Analysis application makes sports performance more understandable
The Olympic Winter Games kicked off this weekend. In addition to the traditional results and the gold medal listings, a new, free application has been developed to help give winter sporting enthusiasts a single stop for information that puts the two weeks into perspective. Sports fans can analyse the results according to their points of interest:
• Alternative medal rankings, not only gold, but also on totals medals, weighted medals and corrected medals by individual or team
• Medal count analysed by a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population
• With historical data, all the medals ever won from the start of the Winter Olympics can be quickly analysed by athlete, sport, country, Winter Olympics edition, age and so on
• Geographical presentation of the performance data using a direct plug-in with Google Maps
The application was developed using QlikView, a leading business intelligence software. QlikView leverages data provided by Infostrada Sports to give fans and professionals more insight on the skiing or skating power of each country and who is truly a powerhouse in snowboarding. Depending on the point of interest, any number of analyses can be done for example based on the country’s size and population.
Infostrada Sports, a company with world-wide sports information, services and products, have worked together with QlikView to convert statistical sport data into valuable information usable by fans and any individual interested in sports. These include organisations such as National Olympic committees, sports associations and sponsors. By using such applications, identifying potential investment in a sport is made easier to identify, substantiate and follow.
Philip Hennemann, founder and CEO of Infostrada Sports, said, “We wanted to take the data that we have to a new level, so that we could provide our clients and the many sports fans around the world, with meaningful information that went beyond simple statistics. The data from our database is rich and full, but does not have any unique analysis capabilities. We were pleasantly surprised how quickly this could come into realisation with QlikView. Within a few days of application development, we had a completely different view of our Winter Olympics data. It was spectacular how quickly QlikView was able to make this happen.”
Ambition
The demo application which contains only the Winter Games Olympic data marks the start of what Infostrada Sports will do with all its data. Every sport, every competition pegged to the World Sports Index will be provided to enable decision makers in the industry to identify and track investments. An athlete’s performance is a measure of the success of those investments and efforts made for those athletes. However, it is also important to make comparisons against other athletes, sporting disciplines and countries, and that can also take into account other variables including the country’s GDP, population, participants in the sport, the popularity of the sport and money allocated to the sport. All sports tracking is important, otherwise there is a risk that key results are missed. The result is that smarter rankings allow for a greater understanding of the best sports performance. All these things together make a great step forward in the analysis of sport.
The application can be viewed at: http://www.qlikview.com/WinterGames2010
