Special issue: Network approaches in complex environments

摘要

With the enormous improvement of data acquisition during the last 10 years or so, the rather serious problem arises how to transform all those data to useful information. Moreover, without analyzing the data one does not know if it contains any useful information at all. Therefore, new and, if possible, automatic devices are needed which are able to accomplish this transformation from data to useful information. Artificial neural networks have proved to be able to do so. As experience from the last decade shows, such networks can successfully be used in sports in case of process analyses where 'process' mainly means motion, game, or training. It has to be pointed out that the development of net-based analysis in sports cannot completely be understood from dealing with only one of those fields of application. A lot of correspondences and connections between those different approaches helped to find appropriate solutions in cases that first looked quite different and eventually turned out to be quite similar.