This group aims to develop an open schema for data in Athletics. Such a common vocabulary will enable interoperability and the development of better software to manage the sport, resulting in major savings of time for volunteers; more efficient management of events and federations; and more services for participants and fans.
The resulting schema will be open and offered as a basis to construct a future standard to manage data in Athletics universally supporting the principles of Linked Data. In order to facilitate and foster adoption, the resulting model will be aligned with schema.org, easy to implement by all sectors —publishers, consumers, competition management, etc.
Model and vocabulary will include basic classes and properties to describe the ecosystem of Athletics competitions. This vocabulary will be extensible beyond this charter, according to detected needs or use cases detected.
This CG will develop technical documents to model and describe data in Athletics, including the following disciplines: Track and Field; Road Running; Race Walking; Cross-Country Running; Mountain Running; and trail Running.
This model will be focus on Athletics competitions, having into account: events; athletes and teams; results; performances; management of start lists; results; and facilities.
The aim of this work is not developing an exhaustive and complete Athletics ontology but having a common and flexible vocabulary to model this information in an easy and intuitive way.
Development of applications, libraries, or any software is excluded from the scope of this charter. OpenTrack vocabularies will exclude aspects apart from the Athletics events such as: federations management; personnel, apart from competitors; event attendees; specific rules for events, such as dimensions of throwing items or tracks; doping management.
This work will not include paralympic athletics specifically, but additional disciplines and categories may be added beyond the first version of this vocabulary.
The proposed OpenTrack model will include two main Specifications:
The group MAY produce other Community Group Reports within the scope of this charter but that are not Specifications, for instance use cases, requirements, list of tools and implementations, etc.
This is out the scope of this charter, but the group MAY produce test suites to support the Specifications. Please see the GitHub LICENSE file for test suite contribution licensing information.
Work will be developed starting from existing implementations, schemas and working examples by Reportlab. Models will be created from the rules set by official entities like IAAF, WMA, European Athletics and other Athletics federations.
OpenTrack CG will follow others W3C groups such as OpenActive CG and schema.org CG.
OpenTrack Community Group operates under the Community and Business Group Process. Terms in this Charter that conflict with those of the Community and Business Group Process are void.
As with other Community Groups, W3C seeks organizational licensing commitments under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA). When people request to participate without representing their organization's legal interests, W3C will in general approve those requests for this group with the following understanding: W3C will seek and expect an organizational commitment under the CLA starting with the individual's first request to make a contribution to a group Deliverable. The section on Contribution Mechanics describes how W3C expects to monitor these contribution requests.
The group will not publish Specifications on topics other than those listed under Specifications above. See below for how to modify the charter.
Substantive Contributions to Specifications can only be made by Community Group Participants who have agreed to the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
Specifications created in the Community Group must use the W3C Software and Document License. All other documents produced by the group should use that License where possible.
Community Group participants agree to make all contributions in the GitHub repo the group is using for the particular document. This may be in the form of a pull request (preferred), by raising an issue, or by adding a comment to an existing issue.
All Github repositories attached to the Community Group must contain a copy of the CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE files.
The group will conduct all of its technical work in public. If the group uses GitHub, all technical work will occur in its GitHub repositories (and not in mailing list discussions). This is to ensure contributions can be tracked through a software tool.
Meetings may be restricted to Community Group participants, but a public summary or minutes must be posted to the group's public mailing list, or to a GitHub issue.
This group will seek to make decisions where there is consensus. Groups are free to decide how to make decisions (e.g. Participants who have earned Committer status for a history of useful contributions assess consensus, or the Chair assesses consensus, or where consensus isn't clear there is a Call for Consensus [CfC] to allow multi-day online feedback for a proposed course of action). It is expected that participants can earn Committer status through a history of valuable contributions as is common in open source projects. After discussion and due consideration of different opinions, a decision should be publicly recorded (where GitHub is used as the resolution of an Issue).
If substantial disagreement remains (e.g. the group is divided) and the group needs to decide an Issue in order to continue to make progress, the Committers will choose an alternative that had substantial support (with a vote of Committers if necessary). Individuals who disagree with the choice are strongly encouraged to take ownership of their objection by taking ownership of an alternative fork. This is explicitly allowed (and preferred to blocking progress) with a goal of letting implementation experience inform which spec is ultimately chosen by the group to move ahead with.
Any decisions reached at any meeting are tentative and should be recorded in a GitHub Issue for groups that use GitHub and otherwise on the group's public mail list. Any group participant may object to a decision reached at an online or in-person meeting within 7 days of publication of the decision provided that they include clear technical reasons for their objection. The Chairs will facilitate discussion to try to resolve the objection according to the decision process.
It is the Chairs' responsibility to ensure that the decision process is fair, respects the consensus of the CG, and does not unreasonably favour or discriminate against any group participant or their employer.
Participants in this group choose their Chair(s) and can replace their Chair(s) at any time using whatever means they prefer. However, if 5 participants, no two from the same organisation, call for an election, the group must use the following process to replace any current Chair(s) with a new Chair, consulting the Community Development Lead on election operations (e.g., voting infrastructure and using RFC 2777).
Participants dissatisfied with the outcome of an election may ask the Community Development Lead to intervene. The Community Development Lead, after evaluating the election, may take any action including no action.
The group can decide to work on a proposed amended charter, editing the text using the Decision Process described above. The decision on whether to adopt the amended charter is made by conducting a 30-day vote on the proposed new charter. The new charter, if approved, takes effect on either the proposed date in the charter itself, or 7 days after the result of the election is announced, whichever is later. A new charter must receive 2/3 of the votes cast in the approval vote to pass. The group may make simple corrections to the charter such as deliverable dates by the simpler group decision process rather than this charter amendment process. The group will use the amendment process for any substantive changes to the goals, scope, deliverables, decision process or rules for amending the charter.