11/05/24
February 20, 2002
SportsML: The Sports Markup Language...: Too nerdy, or just nerdy enough?
posted by kirkaracha to general at 02:29 PM - 6 comments
great idea, but it's only geeky enough if there is some sort of open source implementation. the International Press Telecommunications Council members seem to be made up the pro journalism syndicate big boys, AP-UPI-Reuters. somehow i don't see any free/cheap sportsML feeds being made available to Melvin McHacker anytime soon. would be fun to play with tho. i'd love to see the markup of the SI swimsuit issue.
posted by danostuporstar at 08:57 PM on February 20, 2002
dano: well, assuming there is no really weird licensing of the DTD, it'd be fairly easy to hack up Free stuff. I for one would love to convert, say, the ACC stats at sportsstats into something like this, and there really isn't much they can do about it if they release the DTD. We'll see, though.
posted by tieguy at 09:01 PM on February 20, 2002
Will someone tell me again why XML is so great?
posted by insomnyuk at 12:57 AM on February 21, 2002
NewsML has been around for a while and seems to be serving a purpose for the big publishers that created it. I looked into the format for a site I was working on, but it's a lot more complex than I cared to implement. XML is great because it makes it easier to exchange data and because it's self-documenting. Because of the wide availability of XML parsing tools, if you're a programmer who wants to read XML into a program or use XML-RPC to communicate with an Internet server, a lot of the work is already done for you.
posted by rcade at 07:32 AM on February 21, 2002
OK, so I'm 3 1/2 months late with this posting, but in the spirit of better-late-than-never... SportsML is an open standard for structuring data on scores, schedules, standings, and stats, and anyone's free to adopt this XML vocabulary (a.k.a. XML DTD), contribute suggestions, produce applications, etc. As was noted in this space back in February, some big-league publishers are behind it. And we've got some big-league Sports Leagues interested, too. But I'd also love to see some grass-roots momentum among high schools, smaller leagues, etc., sending their box scores to web sites and newspapers in SportsML. Imagine all the localized searching and alerting applications that could be developed! Any suggestions on how to build up use of the standard? Email me at sportsml @karben14.com Alan Karben Chairman, SportsML Committee.
posted by karben at 01:22 PM on June 04, 2002
I'm going to go with just nerdy enough. Maybe XML will save the world (insert cackling laughter). Could you imagine, though, all the markup tags necessary to describe every stat in the olympics?