The Sport Database: Some Comments

Abstract

The Sport Database is one of the most deservedly popular information tools in the field of physical activity and sport. One reason for its popularity is that the documents contained in it are received from throughout the world. But, as often happens, our deficiencies are the consequence of our merits. Precisely this wide geographical scope and the database's constant growth, combined with the isolation of indexers and the weak coordination of their work, can make problems for the database's constructors as well as users. Under such circumstances the quality of its main indexing and searching instrument — the Sport Thesaurus — acquires great significance. It must be noted that this tool exists both in printed form (Sport Thesaurus 1994 Edition) and on optical disc (Sport Discus 1975‐June 1995), and the differences between these two versions of the same thing are often substantial. One would like to hope that their constant improvement is the main reason for this situation, but some examples make one doubt it. From now on the printed version will be called ‘edition’ and the CDROM version ‘disc’. The insertion of the huge database SIRLS into the Sport Database, which took place some time ago without changing the database's specific indexing, was taken into account in all calculations. In this paper I want not only to analyse some basic deficiencies of this thesaurus and to trace their manifestations in the database, but to propose some ways it could be improved. I hope that they will be helpful for the users of the Sport Database as well as other databases on optical discs.