Team
Rui Yan - knowledge engineer, software engineer
Hao Zhong - knolwedge engineer, software engineer, domain expert (certified soccer referee affiliated with United States Soccer Federation and National Intercollegiate Soccer Officials Association)
Motivation, Introduction and Background
Soccer (a.k.a. “association football”) is one of the most influential and popular sports internationally. An offside offense is one of the most common offenses in soccer. Offside decision mistakes result in either allowing an illegal attacking opportunity or disallowing a legal one, and consequently affect the outcome of the games. According to several studies of professional and international level matches, rates of incorrect offside decisions range from 17.5% to an astonishing 36.8%[1].
All domains nowadays are enhanced by technologies. In a soccer scenario, technologies help team coaches keep track of the player's performance by monitoring player's heart rate, sweating and muscle, information of which wouldn't be possible to get before. Other than the biological features, installed sensors on either shin guard or in the sport underwear call also streams the position, velocity, acceleration data to either the coach, referee or audience. The positional data is particularly useful for the assistant referees (who are also called as linesman), whose major responsibility is to flag offside offence. Because of the nature of the offside offence, an assistant referee need to keep track of the second last defender, the last ball toucher, as well as the attacker who is involved in active play. In a soccer game, things change fast, thus being able to provide accurate and in-team judgment is a key to a game.
As we have mentioned that the error rate is very high even among the top level referees, we propose a stream reasoning method to facilitate linesman on offside judgement. We present a soccer offside ontology, annotate the player's streaming positional data in order to provide a real-time reasoning result on who commits the offside offence.
The picture below shows the already-in-use technology gear called GPSports. More about this cool equipment: link
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A Soccer Offside Example
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References
[1]Catteeuw, Peter, et al. "Offside decision making in the 2002 and 2006 FIFA World Cups." Journal of sports sciences 28.10 (2010): 1027-1032.