Analysis method

All the data elaborated and displayed on www.judodata.com are fruit of a statistical study originated by the notational analysis of the JudoData research team.

This analysis acts on a scheme that follows a deductive approach going from the general to the particular (Top-Down). By this logic, it is therefore possible to obtain both general macro-data and a very accurate detail level about a single specific aspect.

Even though this approach turns out to be of a vertical kind, its elaboration, over the years, has not started from the highest point, but rather from a central point, that is the single match, the basic unit in order to start going upward to define the most general aspects and downward to investigate the most specific and exquisitely technical ones.

So even today, each single match nomenclature, thought in way that gives immediately the general information such as, for example, the Year, the Competition level (Grand Prix, Grand Slam; etc), the City in which the competition took place, the Weight Category, the two athletes’ names and the referee’s one, together with its internal investigation through a journey called “notational analysis” (namely the registration of what happens in a match) provide to give all the essential data to determine a picture of what was observed.

So what was created with this method is a large relational database in which it is possible to move not only vertically but also in a transversal way and therefore elaborate the information, giving back interesting but especially functional descriptive statistics, as a photo album in which each image is positioned in a precise space.

The methodological process that leads to the results on the JudoData website is developed in three phases.

The first phase is about observation and registration of the Events (everything that happens in a single match), nowadays easier thanks to the Internet and the immediate availability of the different International competitions videos. In this phase the Events are recorded and detailed, hour-by-hour in a semi-automatic way with a basic detail level, namely depending on what is immediately and easily identifiable by the referee gestures.

The second phase is the one of the detail in every single Event. This is the most delicate phase and it is carried out in a manual way by a performance specialist; it is the moment in which all the technical aspects are detailed, the one that allows to give back all the data in their full usage power. It turns out to be also the slowest phase, because it needs accuracy; in fact if the first phase takes the length of a match, the second one develops in a 1.5 longer time, because often the actions are highly complicated to discriminate and associate in an univocal way.

The third phase, the Statistical Elaboration, is done automatically by a powerful calculation engine that allows to look at the data as they are on www.judodata.com. The setting of this calculation engine, with all its performance indexes and the relations of the data to calculate, is fruit of years of study and it keeps evolving to adapt to the eventual changes of regulamentation, other than new technologies to support these complicated operations.