A network approach to investigate the aggregation phenomena in sports

In June of 2009, thanks to the direct support of the S.U.I.S.M. in Torino, We-Sport s.r.l. was born as a spin-off of the Motor Science Research Center, with the goal of developing and maintaining a vertical social network (we-sport.com), capable of linking athletes through some significant sport parameters: Sport, Location, Schedule, Level, Age and Gender. In this way, one of the main problems of sports practice, i.e. the lack of a partner with which to practice one's favorite sport, could be solved by using a web tool. Two years after, the project We-Sport has won numerous national and international awards, it received private fundings and investments from capital ventures as well as made arrangements with the most important Italian institutions for sports promotion. Moreover, the information derived from the data obtained by individual users provides a large database to be used for further scientific purposes. Using the bindings of different sports played by individual users of the network, the representative graph of We-Sport was constructed. According to this approach, a system of interacting entities can be represented as a set of points, called nodes, and a relationship between two objects is represented by an arc connecting the two corresponding nodes. In recent years, indeed, it's possible to observe a growing interest in the use of graphs for the study of complex systems in various fields such as epidemiology, social sciences, cell biology, economics and politics. Special features of the We-Sport network representation is the use of a particular familiy of graphs: bipartite graphs wich allow to highlight connectivity, density,clustering,centrality of the nodes, assortative mixing and identification of mesoscopic structures through community detection. The interesting properties of the We-Sport network allow a further level of interpretation and analysis of aggregation phenomena in the specific context of exercise and sport activities.