{"id":7,"date":"2017-03-29T15:34:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T15:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.w3.org\/community\/opentrack\/?p=7"},"modified":"2017-03-29T15:34:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T15:34:58","slug":"opentrack-community-group-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.w3.org\/community\/opentrack\/2017\/03\/29\/opentrack-community-group-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenTrack Community Group Launch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Athletics is maybe the most global sport, being the flagship events\u00a0of the Olympic games in terms of both participation\u00a0and popularity. Due to this universal interest, information about these events \u2014 athletes\u2019 bio and performance, timing, competition, venues, etc. \u2014 is considered as of great value for an international audience. Statisticians and journalists find it immensely useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to professional athletics, amateur running competitions are increasing year after year with a direct,\u00a0multi-billion impact<\/a> on the markets. In this case, where business is between private corporations and runners, there is a similar competition process (registration, timing, results) but there are no common standards to represent and share the information among stakeholders. Most of these companies collect and manage information in their systems without any potential integration with external systems. Thus, open standards in the amateur running industry would enable opportunities, such as international partnerships, to enhance the services for runners (athletic history, complex reporting, social network integration, etc.) and new business models behind this trend-setting pastime.<\/span><\/p>\n

This kind of information, published (and reused) as open data, could bring us opportunities in terms of business and new services to organizers and\u00a0supporters. \u00a0Most of this information is non-sensitive and extremely valuable. Companies such as\u00a0ReportLab<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Tilastopaja<\/a>\u00a0have been using athletics data to create tools and services to process and analyze the information, so all of this is already a reality.<\/p>\n

Now, with the support of\u00a0European Athletics<\/a>, we launch this OpenTrack Community Group\u00a0in order to evolve the technology in this sport. Within this group we\u00a0will\u00a0discuss <\/span>standards for representing and sharing athletics information. The main objective is to define the basic schemas and vocabularies to describe the world of athletics.<\/span><\/p>\n

As part of the final specifications we would like to produce, we will have:<\/span><\/p>\n