The IPTC Sports Content Working Group is proud to release version 1.1 of IPTC Sport Schema.

Documented at the dedicated site sportschema.org, Sport Schema is IPTC’s semantic web (RDF) based ontology for describing sports listings, results, statistics and even play-by-play actions during any kind of sports event.

Version 1.1 adds the following new features:

• We add a Club type, which can handle the organisation that hosts one or more teams of varying types, possibly across various sports. (Did you know that Bayern Munich has not just the famous men’s, women’s and junior football/soccer teams, but also basketball, handball, table tennis and even chess teams!)
• We also add a TeamMembership type, so a Team can be a member of a Club (and could theoretically move from one Club to another). 
• We add support for the concept of “sports facets” that we originated in SportsML. (based on SportsML / NewsCodes facets) so we can now say that an event is “women’s 400 metres relay swimming”, not just “swimming”. The boxing example shows  that the weight class of the event is “welterweight”.
• Added the ability to link from Athlete to Team via a new teamParticipation property.
• Add an AssociateMembership type so an Associate (such as a coach) can have a tenure relating to any Agent, including an Athlete or a Team. Previously Associates were linked to Teams via Participation objects which wasn’t satisfactory.
• Expanded and added to examples including a Boxing example showing how the new AssociateMembership type can be used to represent a coach or manager of an individual athlete (in this case a boxer)
• Added new golf ontology taking some properties from SportsML and some from the Golf vocabularies in IPTC NewsCodes. We have merged them together in Sport Schema for ease of use.
• Many cleanups to the SHACL Shapes used for validation of data.

Please take a look at Sport Schema and let us know what you think! We would love to hear about Sport Schema being implemented in real-world projects. Please contact IPTC using the Contact Us form or via the public discussion list at groups.io/g/iptc-sportsml/