A metaphoric trajectory data warehouse for Olympic athlete follow-up

Sport science is a research discipline that aims to understand exercise and apply scientific methods in support of increasing an athlete's performance. In this paper, we present initial results on modeling, managing and analyzing an athlete's data gathered by sport scientists. An Olympic data warehouse is designed initially to support the monitoring of an athlete's biochemical data. A trajectory data model is extended to represent the athlete's measurements along his/her training states, referred to here as metaphoric trajectories. Furthermore, a data warehouse for metaphoric trajectories is designed and two analysis approaches — a relational and a multidimensional one — are evaluated. We compare both approaches and discuss their benefits to the athlete's follow-up analyses applied by sport scientists. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.