Re: 2014 Sports Proposal - V3

On 06/18/2014 12:09 PM, Jason Johnson (BING) wrote:
> Thank you everyone for the tremendous amount of feedback.  Keep it coming.
>
> ===================================
>
> [Peter] What makes something a team sport?  Only teams compete in Nascar, not
> individuals, for example. Pairs tennis is competed by two players, which might
> be considered to be a team.  There are team competitions in tennis. Are
> olympic sports contested by teams or by individuals?
>
> [Peter] You have several olympic sports.  However, half of these are not
> actually olympic sports according to Wikipedia.  Snowboarding is a discipline
> of skiing, swimming is a displine of aquatics, track isn't even a discpline.
>
> [Peter] What makes a sport professional?  Is that there are professional
> competitions in it?  Then just about everything listed as olympic sports are
> professional, but the "(additive)" seems to indicate otherwise.
>
> I assume you're referring to the section of our proposal where we list the
> head sports we targeted.  If so, that organization was not a means of
> dictating how to categorize those sports, it was merely an illustration of
> mental model we used as we brainstormed an initial set of sports to consider.
> Would you recommend we put a comment in the proposal specifically denoting this?

I don't think that this would help at all.  These examples serve to set the 
stage for the rest of the proposal.  If you give Nascar (a sport performed by 
teams of athletes involving a driver and several pit crew) as an example of an 
individual sport, then readers will either be confused or think that you don't 
know what you are talking about.  If you give tennis as an individual sport 
then readers will have problems determining how to categorize doubles tennis. 
  If you give Snowboarding as an Olympic sport then those who realize that 
Snowboarding is instead an Olympic discipline either think that there is 
something tricky going on or think that you don't know what you are doing.  As 
so on.  You need instead to provide correct, and non-controversial examples.

> [Peter] Is a sport necessarily competitive?  Skiing is not necessarily
> competitive. Is recreational skiing a sport?  If not, you are using up a term
> for something that more naturally should be used for something else. Is a
> sport necessarily athletic?  Some non-athletic activites, e.g., chess, have
> governing bodies that belong to associations of sports governing bodies. What
> is a sport?  Is it a competitive activity that follows certain rules? This
> can't be, as just about every sport you list has variants that are played
> under different rules.  Is a sport something that has a governing body to
> codify several sets of rules?  This doesn't work either, as only a couple of
> the sports you list have particular governing bodies.  Is a sport something
> that people think of as a natural grouping?  This seems closer, but hockey
> doesn't fit here as ice hockey and field hockey are so very different.
> Without some guidance as to what a sport is, how can there be any
> commonalities between what people use as sports?
>
> I assume you are referring to the description we use for the proposed 'sport'
> property of a SportsOrganization? If so, how about we simply point at
> Wikipedia's definition?

That would help a bit, but the Wikipedia page is actually quite coy about not 
really defining what a sport is or is not.  It does more or less indicate that 
chess is not a sport, but it doesn't say just what a sport is.  It would be 
better, I think to state whether you believe that sports can have sub-sports.

[...]

> [Peter] What is the decision for a tie?  What is the decision for a cricket draw?
>
> [Thad] class of Decision - How is a tie in a resultDecision reflected ?  Can
> you give an example ?  I did not see one in the latest PDF.  Does that mean we
> possibly should have a tieDecision ... or is that too much ?   I want to
> express this, within the resultDecision iteself
>
> Thinking through this more, if we have a 'WinDecision' and 'LoseDecision' then
> arguably we should have a 'DrawDecision' or 'TieDecision'.  That being said,
> we should also note what our guidance would be in cases where ties / draws
> happen in a given set of 'PlaceDecision' - e.g. "They tied for third and they
> tied for fifth place".  I think the answer is you simply use an array of
> 'PlaceDecision' with the same place value.  Welcome to further thoughts on this.

Some of this can perhaps best be handled by saying that the result of a 
sporting event is a partial pre-order of the participants, plus some status 
flags.  Perhaps even better would be to distinguish between sports events that 
provide such an ordering and sports events that provide symbolic results.  Of 
course, some sports events might be both.

The actual details of decisions seems to be rather complex.  This is not 
helped by using PlaceDecision as that is used in several kinds of racing (win, 
show, place).  What is the difference between two competitors sharing a 
WinDecision and them both having separate WinDecisions?  Can a SportsEvent 
have more than one value for resultDecision?  Can you provide any example 
where this complexity matters?  If not, then why have the complexity?


> [Peter] Some sports governing bodies, including cricket, provide for different
> kinds of status situations for events.  For example, baseball games can be in
> various states for quite some time, including suspended and protested, and can
> end up never being officially completed.
>
> Happy to hear additional recommendations for states.  Sounds like you are
> recommending we add 'EventSuspended' and 'EventUnderProtest'?

Well if you want to model Cricket and Baseball, you probably need to do 
something along these lines.

[...]


> The intent was to start simple and allow folks to leverage
> 'SportsOrganization' to describe things like leagues, conferences, divisions,
> governing bodies, etc.  Usage would then dictate which more specific types of
> sports organizations we would explicitly type.  I'm happy to hear arguments
> for being more proactive. What would you suggest?

I would suggest that you need to model the common situations, and seasons and 
competitions are very commmon.

> [Peter] There does not appear to be any way to discuss seasons or any other
> sort of multi-event competition except as sub-events, and Event is very poorly
> set up for anything besides a single-admission event.
>
> [Tom] I think we're missing an attempt at modelling seasons. Here is an
> example of how we model seasons, using the notion of a Recurring Competition:
> https://gist.github.com/tfgrahame/f6c844301f814e075c12
>
> [Gregg] I don’t think we’ve adequately looked at seasons; In my model, a
> Season is a subclass of event (probably CompetitionEvent or SportsEvent, which
> contains the individual competitions taking place during that season. It’s
> also useful for projecting player and coach references, which would be similar
> to those Roles having the same event start/end times, but better makes up a
> team roster for a given season. There are also other things that could be
> tagged to a Season, such as the name of the SportsTeam during this season,
> their venue and other things that may change over time.
>
> The idea of an 'EventSeries' was in an earlier proposal but was pulled in
> light of (and in favor of) the separate and more generic 'ItemList' proposal.

A sports season has different structure than a list.  It may have a preseason, 
a regular season, and a post-season.  It may have several formal competitions 
within it that share sports events.  For professional sports leagues, 
complicated seasons are probably more common than simple seasons.  Even simple 
seasons aren't lists.  First of all, sports events are not text.

peter

PS: I'm not sure how ItemList can be used to model the ordered list of Top 10 
Movies About Weathermen.  Can anyone enlighten me here?

Received on Thursday, 19 June 2014 04:38:52 UTC