SportsML — The Sports Markup Language
Over an afternoon capuccino at Peet’s, I read about SportsML in the final issue of New Architect magazine. When I invented a simple XML-based markup for SoccerPhone in around February or March of 2002, I didn’t realize that a more general purpose XML-based markup language for sports was already being developed. The SportsML 1.0 draft was released in November 2002. But, then again, it’s not like international news organizations regularly send me notices about their standards activities for my perusal and approval.
SportsML is an open, XML-based standard for interchange of sports data, such as scores, schedules, standings, statistics, and apparently any other word that starts with the letter s. Just what the heck is up with that? Anyway, SportsML was developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council. The IPTC also developed NewsML. I was pretty happy to see that SportsML has a large set of soccer specific tags, in addition to american-football, baseball, basketball, golf, ice-hockey, and tennis.
Ideally, I would be able to get SportsML feeds from MLS and Soccernet. Instead, though, I will probably just change SoccerPhone to generate SportsML rather than the markup I created. If it’s not too much work, I’ll probably change SoccerPhone to use SportsML sometime this year.