SportsML: Single Sports
Single sports are sports where you compete as an individual. Examples of single sports are athletics, cross country skiing, alpine skiing, rowing, canoing and so on. It does not mean that you cannot be part of a team. It does how ever imply that the result the individual gets is for his/hers benefit and not necessary the team. There are exceptions to this "rule":
An athlete in a single sport may compete in a competition where the team earns points. An example is the Olympic Games where the country the athlete competes for receives points when the athlete wins or is better than 6th place in that particular event.
Let's now start creating some information to a single sport event. And we then have to introduce (or re-introduce if you have read all pages up until this one) the player element.
The player element
To mark up a single sport event you can choose to just use the player element. As with the team element, the player element requires a metadata element as it's first element. If you have come this far, you have probably read about the player-element, but let's repeat just in case you haven't.
The player element is used to mark up information about a participant in a sport event (competition). It contains the following sub-elements:
| Element name | Element description |
|---|---|
| player-metadata |
Element used to describe the participant. Here you add information about name, home-location, career-phase, injury-phase and more. |
| player-stats |
Element used to give statistic information about the participant. You use this element to give the participant score, awards and so on. |
| wagering-stats |
Element used for odds and wagering. |
| associate |
Element used to add participants to the competition that has some other role than athlete (as an active participant in the competition). You use this element to add for instance a referee, the manager of the team and so on. This element also requires associate-metadata and it's sub-elements like name and so on. This to give descriptive data about the associate. |
| affiliation |
Element used to add affilates to the cometition/team. |
Now that we have some information about the player-element, let's create an example:
<player id="cyclist1234">
<player-metadata gender="male" nationality="Norwegian" uniform-number="1234">
<name last="Doe "first="John" full="John Doe" />
<home-location country="Norway" city="Oslo" />
<career-phase name="example.com" phase-status="active" phase-type="professional"/>
</player-metadata>
<player-stats score="4:04:01.1" event-outcome="win">
<award place="1" />
</player-stats>
</player>
Now let's go through some of the parts in this example, which I have created as an complex one just to show how much information you can insert into this element (there are more attributes. I have only used the most common ones)
In the player element I have created an ID - an self explaining one, cyclist and the bib-number.
Then in the metadata-section I have added gender, nationality and bib (uniform-number). I have also given the athlete a name and associated him with a country and a city. In the career-phase element I have also associated him with a team, though without using the team element. You can also see that the athlete is active and that he is a professional.
Then in the stats element I have added the score (or the time in this example) and that the athlete won the event and that he was awarded the win.
With this amount of data I can produce the following different sports results text:
1: John Doe, Norway 4:04:01.1
Winner: John Doe, Norway 4:04:01.1
1: Doe, John - Norway 4:04:01.1
1: John Doe, example.com, Norway 4:04:01.1
If I had another athlete with phase-type amateur, I could produce a result list with the professionals first and the amateurs second.
To create a result list of single sport participants you would just add more players elements in the document and then rendered this in which ever way is natural for your publication or bureau.