The Australian Sports Commission has made available the Australian Sport Thesaurus in xml format as an open data initiative to assist the sporting community.
(The Thesaurus is hosted by data.gov.au, a site “to encourage public access to and reuse of public data”.)
The Thesaurus is an accumulation of over 15,000 terms covering concepts and objects related to sport and sporting organisations with a strong emphasis on Australian sport. It aims to reduce ambiguity in sporting terminology by providing authorised terms for every sport and sporting activity.
The Australian Sports Thesaurus seeks to provide clarity and assistance to the sport community by:
- ensuring consistency of understanding and usage of sport terminology in documentary, legal and commercial discussions;
- enabling improved system and database interoperability and reporting;
- facilitating search and retrieval of information from sport information systems;
- facilitating the defining of sport data for Data Dictionaries.
This is an evolving project and not all definitions have been verified and the Australian Sports Commission is seeking input from the sporting community to improve this product. While at this stage it is called a Thesaurus, in the longer term it is hoped that the product becomes a sports metadata register for the purpose of creating data standards for data exchange and interoperability.
The Thesaurus is provided on a Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU) that allows all users to copy and use the resource so that they may integrate or adapt the terminology into their own organisations and systems.
Photo Credits
AIS Swim Hall, Bruce, ACT, under construction (1982) (ArchivesACT, CC BY-NC 2.0)
No limits (Keith Lyons, CC BY 4.0)
