Open Athletics Community Group

This is the home repository of Open Athletics CG (officially named OpenTrack CG).

The Open Athletics CG is composed by a group of sports data enthusiasts motivated by the opportunities the open data promised during the rising data revolution in the public sector. This CG is a forum to discuss technology for athletics. We focus on data interoperability, including data exchange across multi-level federations, clubs, timekeepers, race organizers, and the community in general. The group aims to define the best approach to make the most of the sports (open) data through open standards and collaboration.

The CG organizes monthly teleconferences, and its members usually meet in physical meetings, like the series of AthTech Conferences promoted by European Athletics and with the participation of dozens of experts.

This CG aimed to motivate the interchange of Athletics data across federations, clubs and businesses. Interoperability was and still is a challenge due to the heterogeneity of governing bodies and systems (i.e., lack of a central or a federated system to collect results automatically at the international level). Competitions are similar worldwide (i.e., changing distances and units, throwing different objects, and using different surfaces), and most of the information, like the results or the competitors, is public, so global interoperability seems feasible.

Quick links

Info and logistics for the group activities:

• Blog
• Forum & instant messaging
• Contact and feedback
• Meetings calendar.

Documents produced so far:

• Athletics Conceptual Model
• Competition Data Model and Vocabulary based on Schema.org

About Open Athletics (OpenTrack)

This is the repository for the W3C OpenTrack Community Group to develop and document specifications and code related to what we call Open Athletics —formerly OpenTrack, but changed to make the scope broader—, a set of tools to increase interoperability among systems managing information on athletics and sports in general. Open Athletics includes schemes and vocabularies to describe sports, as well as open source software that helps managing that kind of information.

Through OpenTrack and Open Athletics, entities around the world (sport clubs, federations, private event organizers, etc.) will be able to open the data contributing towards open data in sports. This will bring new business opportunities to third parties (developers, public bodies, private companies, citizens, academia).

In order to maximize the impact and adoption of the final proposal, this initiative is supported by European Athletics and other relevant institutions of the world of Data Management and Athletics.

Read the Charter for more information about this group.

What tools?

The main component of OpenTrack is a set of vocabularies and taxonomies that will help publishers to model and expose information regarding athletics (events, athletes, facilities, results, rankings, and others).

Participants in this group will contribute with code recipes, libraries, and examples about the use of athletics information.

Currently, we are working on what we call it, Open Athletics models, vocabularies, and tools:

• A Conceptual Data Model for Athletics to define Athletics competitions, events, management and participation in an abstract way; and
• a Sports Competition Data Model and Vocabulary based on Schema.org. It contains examples of implementation for competitions, participation, athletes, organizations, etc.
• some code examples to illustrate how to use the former vocabulary to describe entities (i.e., athletes, clubs, and federations), and competitions (i.e., disciplines, categories, events) and some useful codes and taxonomies for countries, in-competition features, etc.

Formats and standards

All documents will be written in English and encoded in UTF-8.

Schemas and vocabularies will be aligned with the existing W3C standards, in concrete with the Data on the Web specifications. Although they will be described as abstract vocabularies, they will be also modeled in RDF.

Can I use it?

Of course you can! Unless the piece of software or document listed in this repository has specified an explicit license, everything is under the W3C Software and Document License. This means that, by default, you have permission to copy, modify, and distribute OpenTrack works, with or without modification, for any purpose and without fee or royalty.

How can I participate?

Everyone —either W3C Member or not— is invited to join the W3C OpenTrack CG. Just click on the 'join' button, and register with your W3C account (in case you don't have, please request one. Once you are a group member, you will be subscribed to the main mailing list and the calendar.

How to join?

First, join our forum so you can ask for help :)

1. If you don't have an account, apply for one.
2. Login on the W3C system.
3. And apply for joining the group.

If you have never used Github, please have a look at this guide on how to use Github at W3C.

References

This work is based on previous works on sports data modeling, such as:

• IOC ODF
• IPTC SportsML. Vocabularies for sharing content (e.g., news) about sports in general. There are some specific vocabularies for concrete sports. Athletics is missing.
• BBC Sport Ontology. Lightweight ontology for publishing data about competitive sports events.