SportsML

The open standard for sports data

SportsML is an open, flexible standard for the interchange of sports data.

It is suitable for representing results in all sports from Athletics to Zui Quan and is used by major news organisations to cover Olympics, World Cup and regional championships, as well as domestic and local competitions.

Companies using SportsML include:

• BBC
• The Associated Press
• PA Media
• Univision
• Many more

The SportsML model is simple, intuitive and uniform. It represents the intuitive hierarchy of sport in common language. For example:

tournament/tournament-part/sports-event/team/player/player-stat

Names (such as team and player) are uniform across the specification and the standard genres of sport news reports (schedule, statistical table, event report) are included in the model.

Here are some samples:

• 100m Finals, 2016 Olympics
• Biathlon
• FIFA World Cup tournament structure
• Baseball Event Report
• Ice Hockey Statistics
• Rugby Table/Standings
• Tennis: Davis Cup
• More Samples

Reasons to use SportsML

• Avoid vendor lock-in by using an open, universal standard
• Users can contribute to the specification via the SportsML public mailing list
• Simple, intuitive and consistent model that is easy to adopt
• Represents standard report types: scores, lineups, schedules, standings, statistics, etc.

Key features

• Generic statistical structure: SportsML allows for the an open-ended generic representation of statistics using vocabularies from any source (and includes the ability to reference and mix vocabularies)
• Semantic tech capabilities: 114 sports controlled vocabularies for everything from event-status (pre-event, mid-event, suspended, halted, etc.) to statistical concepts for 11 major sports, with more to come. The vocabularies come in the form of NewsML-G2 Knowledge Items.
• Flexible tournament formation: Tournaments can be difficult to model and SportsML has a generic tournament-part element with a comprehensive typing vocabulary (eg. round, stage, etc.)
• Flexible Schema: SportsML features an easily extensible and customizable schema design
• Fully compatible with NewsML-G2 structures such as names, locations and date formats.

The SportsML 3.1 update was released in June 2019.

SportsML 3 was released in July 2016. It is a comprehensive update to SportsML 2.2.

Development of SportsML is open to collaboration. Your feedback on the SportsML Users Forum is welcome!

Who is using SportsML

AP mobile (USA), APA (Austria), BBC (UK), ESPN (USA), NTB (Norway), PA (UK), Reuters News & Media (Global), Univision (USA/Mexico), XML Team Solutions (USA), Yahoo! Sports (USA)