Ontologies in Motion: A BFO-Based Approach to Knowledge Graph Construction for Motor Performance Research Data in Sports Science
Sarah Rebecca Ondraszek, Jörg Waitelonis, Katja Keller, Claudia Niessner, Anna M. Jacyszyn, Harald Sack
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of organizing motor performance data for machine readability and interoperability in sports science. It presents a MO|RE ontology built on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) with privacy-aware extensions to model studies, test items, processes, and measurements as interconnected entities in a knowledge graph within the DiTraRe program. A Handgrip test use case demonstrates how test items, concrete executions, participants, and scalar outcomes can be represented and queried to support cross-study comparisons. The work aims to advance open science and data provenance in sports science by enabling standardized data sharing and cross-domain integration with healthcare, education, and psychology data.
Abstract
An essential component for evaluating and comparing physical and cognitive capabilities between populations is the testing of various factors related to human performance. As a core part of sports science research, testing motor performance enables the analysis of the physical health of different demographic groups and makes them comparable. The Motor Research (MO|RE) data repository, developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is an infrastructure for publishing and archiving research data in sports science, particularly in the field of motor performance research. In this paper, we present our vision for creating a knowledge graph from MO|RE data. With an ontology rooted in the Basic Formal Ontology, our approach centers on formally representing the interrelation of plan specifications, specific processes, and related measurements. Our goal is to transform how motor performance data are modeled and shared across studies, making it standardized and machine-understandable. The idea presented here is developed within the Leibniz Science Campus ``Digital Transformation of Research'' (DiTraRe).