IPTC Sport Schema

Like its ancestor SportsML, IPTC Sport Schema is created as a generic sports data model that can represent results, statistics, schedules and rosters across many sports. “Plugins” for specific sports extend the generic schema with specific statistics elements for 10 sports such as soccer, motor racing, tennis, rugby and esports. But the generic model can be used to handle any competitive sports competition, either team-based, head-to-head or individual.

As well as IPTC’s SportsML standard, the project is based on previous work by the BBC on its BBC Sport Ontology: some of its creators worked on this project. We have also consulted with and analysed related projects and formats such as OpenTrack and the IOC’s Olympic Data Feed format.

Project goals and principles

Our goals were to ensure that the model and vocabulary is:

Comprehensive: it should be able to handle schedules, results and statistics for many types of sports, whether team, individual or head-to-head.

Easy to use: should be approachable by non-experts in Semantic Web technologies. For example, the JSON-LD versions should be simple enough that they can be parsed by any competent developer who is comfortable with handling JSON files.

Easy to query: for those who want to use the power of RDF features such as SPARQL, querying data should be as simple as possible.

Compatible with schema.org: We want the IPTC Sport Schema to be self-contained, but it should be possible to use it alongside schema.org in the future.

More information on IPTC Sport Schema

More information on IPTC Sport Schema is available on the dedicated site sportschema.org:

• A schema overview and a detailed schema diagram
• Detailed ontology documentation
• A broad set of use cases that were used to validate the design of the schema and to provide examples of real-world data and queries
• Example instance diagrams showing how the model can handle the structures required by golf, athletics, cycling, soccer/football and more
• A comparison between IPTC Sport Schema and other sports data models including IPTC SportsML, the IOC’s Olympic Data Feed format, OpenAthletics, BBC Sport ontology and more

Developer resources on GitHub

The main Sport Schema ontology documentation is available on the SportSchema.org site. Additional source code, materials and developer resources are also available on the project’s GitHub repository. This includes:

• Sample data using the Sport Schema model in Turtle, RDF/XML and JSON-LD format describing sports data across a range of sports: soccer, athletics, esports, cycling, horse racing and more
• A broad-ranging set of unit tests covering many different sports, created using a bespoke RDF testing framework (also available in the repository)
• A SHACL-based validation system explained on the validation section of the sportschema.org website
• SKOS versions of IPTC Sport controlled vocabularies, used as metadata values for many of the Sport Schema statistics properties such as player status (starter, bench, sidelined, injured), event status (pre-event, post-event, cancelled, postponed), soccer position (midfielder, defender, striker, manager, coach), tournament phase (heat, group stage, round, semi-final, final) and many more
• A tool for converting from SportsML 3.1 to IPTC Sport Schema using XSLT.

For more information on IPTC Sport Schema, please join the public iptc-sportsml@groups.io email discussion list. IPTC members can discuss on the IPTC members-only discussion list iptc-sportsml-dev@groups.io.