Many of the team sports, such as water polo, handball, and baseball, require lots of player information to be gathered during the event. For instance, we want to know how many shots on goal a player has taken or how many strikeouts a pitcher has recorded.
In the past, collecting and analyzing this type of information was tedious manual work. Scorers would sit with paper and pen and record the information. Then this information had to be entered into a database for it to be analyzed, printed, and distributed. Not only tedious, this method also introduced delays. For the 1996 Games, the results management team has developed a program that runs on an IBM ThinkPad and uses a pen-based entry device to record this raw data. While a
ll the sports have different criteria for scoring, the developers made a common interface for all team sports. Each sport has a graphical representation of its playing field surrounded by a player list and icons representing such things as a shot on goal, a turnover, or a penalty (
see the screen
).
The system is easy to use. For example, to record a shot attempted but missed, the official scoring the event tags the player's name with the pen, tags the missed icon, and indicates where on the playing field the shot was taken from. Because the official has to be close to the field to record this information (and because it would not be a good idea to have cables on the playing field), the notebooks use a wireless link into the results management system LAN in the venue where the event takes place. The wireless link is also used to download (to the notebook from the LAN server) the list of participants in the event.
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