Digital technology for the national sport development: Designing a database model to analyse elite sports data

Relational database models offer a pathway for the storage, standardization, and analysis of factors influencing national sports development. While existing research delves into the factors linked with sporting success, there remains an unexplored avenue for the design of databases that seamlessly integrate quantitative analyses of these factors. This study aims to design a relational database to store and analyse quantitative sport development data by employing information technology tools. The database design was carried out in three phases: (i) exploratory study for context analysis, identification, and delimitation of the data scope; (ii) data extraction from primary sources and cataloguing; (iii) database design to allow an integrated analysis of different dimensions and production of quantitative indicators. An entity-relationship diagram and an entity-relationship model were built to organize and store information relating to sports, organizations, people, investments, venues, facilities, materials, events, and sports results, enabling the sharing of data across tables and avoiding redundancies. This strategy demonstrated potential for future knowledge advancement by including the establishment of perpetual data updates through coding and web scraping. This, in turn, empowers the continuous evaluation and vigilance of organizational performance metrics and sports development policies, aligning seamlessly with the journal’s focus on cutting-edge methodologies in the realm of digital technology.