When Claire Short talks about Spidarman (and she does so, often), it is important to understand that she is not referring to the red and blue tights-wearing comic book cum movie hero. Short, who is the Audio Visual Services Manager at the Australian Sports Commission`s (ASC`s) National Sport Information Centre, is actually talking about SPIDAR — the acronym for Sports Performance Information and Digital Asset Repository. SPIDAR is a high-capacity digital asset management solution designed to securely store critical ASC performance-analysis files and multimedia data. This leading-edge information technology application can manage all categories of digital material including photographic and medical images, video and audio recordings, electronic documents, and proprietary performance-analysis files. For the technically minded, SPIDAR is a 40-terabytes (TB) Apple hardware solution supported by MediaBeacon digital asset-management software. Forty terabytes is enough disk space to accommodate approximately 40 000 hours of quality digital video. SPIDAR is located in the ASC Information Technology Data Centre at Canberra and is accessed and operated by users connected to the ASC computer network. Users can store, identify, view and retrieve assets using their desktop computer. SPIDAR enables Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) athletes, coaches, sports scientists and staff to store and share important digital information that is critical to their program`s ongoing development and improvement. AIS coaches and sports scientists regularly use IT applications to conduct performance-analysis activities within competition, training and testing environments. This produces large volumes of high-quality, bandwidth-intensive, multi-format, digital image and video-related performance-analysis assets on a daily basis. SPIDAR can handle it all. Via SPIDAR, all the information will eventually be securely stored, indexed and reliably accessed from anywhere in the world, at any time. Due to cost, bandwidth availability and accessibility issues, SPIDAR will be phased in over the next four years. The next exciting initiative, planned for this year, is to spread SPIDAR`s web, as it were, by launching it on the internet. This will give ASC users access to the corporate repository when travelling abroad. From there, there are plans to spread the web even further to accommodate a broad range of users outside the ASC to create a community of `live` digital asset collaboration within the Australian high performance sports sector. (http://www.abc.net.au/ra/innovations/stories/s1573890.htm)
© Copyright 2006 Ausport. Australian Sports Commission Publications. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.