Fwd: [sportsml] Tournament Structures

[Chadwick Boulay]

A while ago I was pondering the idea of standardizing ultimate data. The best sports data standard that I found was sportsml. The major problem with SportsML was that it had terrible support for tournaments, and ultimate is almost all tournaments. It seems that they are finally adding tournaments into SportsML.

If we eventually want to get ultimate data syndicated by various news agencies, then it makes sense to use standard formats. If someone can point me to a better format than SportsML then I'd appreciate that. If we ever intend on using SportsML, then we should make sure it supports our tournament structures.

Please send me tournament structure descriptions (as per the forwarded e-mail) or send them directly to trond...@ntb.no
I don't think you can post to sportsml yahoogroup directly but I will do it if you e-mail me.

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	[sportsml] Tournament Structures
Date:	Fri, 2 Nov 2012 07:38:25 +0000
From:	<trond...@ntb.no>
Reply-To:	spor...@yahoogroups.com
To:	<spor...@yahoogroups.com>

 

Hi SportsML List

 

We are currently looking at SportsML 3.0 and one of the tasks at hand is to look at the markup of tournaments. Since we want the 3.0 version to cover most tournament structures, we need descriptions that tells us how the tournament is set up.

So if you have any complex, odd, out of the ordinary, please do not hesitate to come with a description.

 

Here are two examples on how to write a tournament description:

 

Straight tournament

A straight tournament is fairly simple. X number of teams will meet each other one or more times. You have a total standing and a number of rounds. Games belong to rounds but not necessarily the same day or place. Exactly how the standings is calculated is not part of the XML-structure. But you might want to be able to have more than one standings table so you can show home results, away results, latest x rounds etc.

 

Beach Volleyboll, Olympics

The competition format description of the Beach Volleyball tournament at the London Olympic Games: In London 2012, both the men’s and women’s Beach Volleyball events begin with a preliminary phase:
    * the 24 teams in each event are divided into six pools of four, and each team plays every other team in their pool.
    * A total of 16 teams from this phase qualify for the knockout phase – the top two teams from each pool and the best two third-ranked teams advance automatically.
    * The four remaining third-ranked teams play a two-match lucky loser round; the two winning teams in the lucky loser round also qualify for the elimination phase.
    * The winners of the semi-finals eventually go head-to-head for the gold.    All matches are the best of three sets, with 21 points needed to win a set (15 in the third and deciding set).

Best regards,

 

Trond Husø

System Developer

Mobile : +47 450 35 715

E-mail : trond...@ntb.no

www.ntb.no

 

 

 

 

 

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[Mark Liu]

I feel like the tournament formats for non-usau events are quite standard and I would be very surprised if the SportsML guys hadn't already seen stuff like that before. The only complex ones I've seen are the huge tournaments that don't have a number of teams that's divisible by 16. Missouri Loves Company comes to mind.

The USAU sectionals and regionals events get a bit crazy, though. You can see their document that covers just about every imaginable scenario by downloading their tournament formats manual here: http://www.usaultimate.org/resources/organizer_resources/default.aspx

I'm guessing the SportsML people are already handling swiss tournaments, but if not maybe Chris should fill them in since he's the expert in Ultimate.

Mark

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[Christian Schaffner]

Hi Chadwick,

I have now joined this spoartsml yahoo group as well. What exactly do
you think will come out of these efforts? How do you see SportsML used
in relation with ultimate and leaguevine?

One possible use could be in computing various rankings based on
leaguevine data as suggested by Mark here:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/leaguevine-developers/NLBifAx7xEo/GwrRQu0nghwJ

Have you heard back from them if they gonna include Swissdraw tournament
formats? (as far as I could see, that should not really be a problem)

Best,
Chris

> <mailto:trond...@ntb.no>

> I don't think you can post to sportsml yahoogroup directly but I
> will do it if you e-mail me.
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [sportsml] Tournament Structures
> Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2012 07:38:25 +0000

> From: <trond...@ntb.no> <mailto:trond...@ntb.no>
> Reply-To: spor...@yahoogroups.com <mailto:spor...@yahoogroups.com>
> To: <spor...@yahoogroups.com> <mailto:spor...@yahoogroups.com>
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi SportsML List____
>
> __ __

>
> We are currently looking at SportsML 3.0 and one of the tasks at
> hand is to look at the markup of tournaments. Since we want the 3.0
> version to cover most tournament structures, we need descriptions

> that tells us how the tournament is set up.____

>
>
> So if you have any complex, odd, out of the ordinary, please do not

> hesitate to come with a description.____
>
> __ __
>
> Here are two examples on how to write a tournament description:____
>
> __ __
>
> *Straight tournament____*

>
> A straight tournament is fairly simple. X number of teams will meet
> each other one or more times. You have a total standing and a number
> of rounds. Games belong to rounds but not necessarily the same day
> or place. Exactly how the standings is calculated is not part of the
> XML-structure. But you might want to be able to have more than one
> standings table so you can show home results, away results, latest x

> rounds etc.____
>
> __ __
>
> *Beach Volleyboll, Olympics____*

>
> The competition format description of the Beach Volleyball
> tournament at the London Olympic Games: In London 2012, both the

> men�s and women�s Beach Volleyball events begin with a preliminary

> phase:
> * the 24 teams in each event are divided into six pools of four,
> and each team plays every other team in their pool.
> * A total of 16 teams from this phase qualify for the knockout

> phase � the top two teams from each pool and the best two

> third-ranked teams advance automatically.
> * The four remaining third-ranked teams play a two-match lucky
> loser round; the two winning teams in the lucky loser round also
> qualify for the elimination phase.
> * The winners of the semi-finals eventually go head-to-head for
> the gold. All matches are the best of three sets, with 21 points
> needed to win a set (15 in the third and deciding set).
>
>

> ____
>
> Best regards,____
>
> __ __
>
> *Trond Hus�____*
>
> System Developer____
>
> Mobile : +47 450 35 715 <tel:%2B47%20450%2035%20715>____
>
> E-mail : trond...@ntb.no <mailto:trond...@ntb.no>____
>
> www.ntb.no <http://www.ntb.no/> ____
>
> __ __
>
> __ __
>
> ntb_signatur_engelsk____
>
> __ __
>
> __ __
>
> __ __

>
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[Chadwick Boulay]

I'm fairly new to web development (just over a year now) so I don't have
a complete picture of everything that's involved. My impression is that
the currently popular data format for inter-process communication is
JSON. That being said, here's where I think using an open data standard
might help, even if it's based on XML:
-syndication; various news outlets already parse SportsML data. It'd be
fairly easy for them to publish ultimate in their syndications if they
could access that data in SportsML.
-legacy tools; there are already tools for converting SportsML to
passable HTML for simple box scores and the like.
-data sharing. e.g. A certain international competition used their own
webservers, custom backends, and custom clients for storing results and
statistical data. The only way to get at these data is by browsing their
HTML pages. If they also shared their data in a standard format
(granted, a simple API is required), and if other European, Asian,
American, etc, tournaments also shared data in this format then it would
be simple for news portals to point their data scrapers at whatever
tournament is hot right now so fans could choose whichever news portal
they liked best, instead of having to bounce around between the
different tournament-specific websites (sometimes with awful UX).

Would you rather get your EPL results from www.premierleague.com, bbc
sports, or automatically at the top of google as soon as you type EPL?
In ultimate you usually don't have a choice, and without choice,
services like ScoreReporter have no incentive to improve and there is a
huge barrier for other services to take over.

[Christian Schaffner]

Thanks Chad for the explanations! I think your arguments make a lot of
sense and this seems a good cause to work on.

What do you think needs to be done? I see that for some common sports,
version 2.2 of SportsML
http://www.iptc.org/site/News_Exchange_Formats/SportsML-G2/Specification/
has specific vocabulary, but I haven't seen anything about Ultimate. Do
you think they would be willing to add that? And what's the "official
procedure" for adding new sports?

Best,
Chris

[Chadwick Boulay]

Individual sports are extensions to the SportsML spec. I don't know the
official path to getting a new sport added, but it would probably help
to have a tested candidate specification.

I started working on an ultimate extension to SportsML two years ago. I
also tried to make a crappy API from which you could GET/POST ultimate
data in SportsML. I got pretty far only to realize that it was really
hard to represent tournaments so I gave up. I also hated PHP
CodeIgniter. I also had no idea what I was doing.
https://github.com/cboulay/SportsML-Ultimate

This was using SportsML 2.1. Tournaments were upgraded in 2.2. It might
be easier now.
I also know a bit more and I'd probably approach it differently. I would
start with a different stack (maybe Django + tastypie plugin), then make
sure the returned JSON has the JSON-equivalent of the SportsML
structure. I think this JSON structure could fit most needs. If/when XML
is requested then we could use a simple XML serializer (e.g.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyxser/ ).

Note that at http://www.sportsdb.org/sd/specification there are some DDL
scripts for creating a schema that completely fits SportsML needs. If I
were starting out with a new web app, I'd use this to create a schema,
then use Django's reflection to build the models, then tweak as
necessary. It'd save quite a bit of time. With a legacy web service it
will probably be difficult to return data and parse data that meet the
specifications but I'm sure someone more experienced and dedicated than
myself could figure it out.

[Mark Liu]

Good stuff, Chad. 

Could you educate me on what SportsML landscape looks like out there? Which major news outlets, websites, leagues, organizations, etc. currently make their data available using a SportsML format? Are paid services like STATS LLC and others also using it? And if not, who are the people in charge of initially populating all of this open data?

I'm super curious because I'd like to learn a bit more on how Leaguevine would fit into this landscape if we decided to open up a second API layer to expose our data in this format as well.

Mark

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