Should we define age categories for youth (below U18)? about opentrack-cg HOT 6 CLOSED

On 12 April, Mirko mentioned that it is also common to find one-year range for youth sports.
Also, there are different criteria to establish these ranges. For instance, some sports/federations considers age ranges taken into account different birthdays-period (sports season or 1st Jan - 31st Dec). So it's difficult to find a common pattern for youth sports.

My proposal is not defining these categories for youth sports (under U18). Leaving this property as free text.

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Proposal:

• Define official known age-range categories.
• Allow adding free text for those special age-range categories

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I would define the set of rules used at competition level, and just refer to it.

In most countries, athletics meetings will just say "Under IAAF rules".

For example, if a competition is run "under UK Athletics Rules", that tells us clearly that we will have U13, U15, U17, U20 with particular cutoff dates; that younger kids can do a maximum of 3 events.
we could simply assume that some function exists
age_group(competition date, birth date...) -> code

The rules of the sport are exhaustively documented and it's easy to cross-refer rather than repeating them in the standard.

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OK, to refer the set of rules related to the category. Good point.

This function (age_group(competition date, birth date...) -> code) would be perfect but we would need a place and tool where all the available codes are listed. In brief, if my script finds a piece of data with something like { 'code':'U18_IAAF_Male' }, it should be able to refer to the code and infer that this means:

• age-range: Under 18
• Under IAAF rules
• gender: Male

So we could match categories, at least by gender and sex.

In this case, in order to describe that "Category X is under Y rules" (related to the code) and make it interoperable for machines, we would need something like:

{
  "@type":"Category",     // This means this instance is of type 'Category'
  "age-range" : "U17",     // 
  "gender" : "Male" ,
  "regulatedBy" : "IAAF"    // @type=>Federation
}

Now the problem is producing this exhaustive list of codes. Or just adding them on the fly.

Ideas?

If we have a single

age_group(competition date, birth date...) -> code

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included the official standard list of age-ranges (those recognized by IAAF, EA, and WMA). The rest will be specified by open text. For instance:

{
  "description" : "Boys under 13 Mars Years",
  "age-range": "U13",
  "ruledBy": "federation:MARS",
  "gender": "gender:Male"
}

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