IPTC SportsJS 1.0 Draft

SportsJS is an open and highly flexible standard for the interchange of sports data in JSON, created by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

It is designed to be easy to understand and implement, and to cover a wide variety of sports competitions. It is based on a direct translation to JSON Schema from the SportsML 3.0 XML Schema and the aim is to keep it semantically consistent with SportsML.

We currently provide a draft4 JSON Schema, but we intend to upgrade this to draft7 and higher as new drafts of the JSON Schema standard are released.

Features

Modular Multi-sport schema
- American Football
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Curling
- Golf
- Ice Hockey
- Motor Racing
- Rugby 
- Soccer 
- Tennis
- Generic Sport statistics
Flexible tournament structure
Flexible event structure
Flexible team structure
Flexible player structure
Generic statistic structures
Semantic structures and vocabularies

Usage

The specification folder contains the work-in-progress JSON Schema files for SportsJS.

Example files

We have created example files showing how SportsJS can be used to express data for various sport events including American football, biathlon, golf, skiing and soccer.

The examples are all in the examples folder and can be validated using any JSON Schema validator.

For example, follow these steps to clone this repository, install the ajv-cli validator, and use it to validate the provided examples:

$ git clone https://github.com/iptc/sportsjs-dev.git
$ cd sportsjs-dev
$ npm install -g ajv-cli
$ ajv validate  -s specification/sportsjs-core.json -r "specification/sportsjs-*.json" -d "examples/*.json"
examples/amfoot-match-classic-generic.json valid
examples/amfoot-match-classic-specific.json valid
examples/amfoot-match-g2-generic.json valid
examples/amfoot-match-g2-specific.json valid
[ ... ]
examples/soccer-standings-classic-specific.json valid
examples/soccer-standings-g2-specific.json valid
examples/tennis_davis_cup_tournament.json valid
examples/tournament-cl-classic.json valid
examples/tournament-cl-g2.json valid

Or if you would prefer to validate using Python's jsonschema, follow these steps (unfortunately the command-line version of jsonschema doesn't allow file globbing so we have to do some magic with find -exec):

$ git clone https://github.com/iptc/sportsjs-dev.git
$ cd sportsjs-dev
$ mkvirtualenv --python=python3 sportsjs
(sportsjs) $ pip install jsonschema
(sportsjs) $ find examples/*.json -exec jsonschema -i {} specification/sportsjs-core.json \;
(sportsjs) $
(no response means there were no validation errors)

Tests

We have created some unit tests for the schema itself to ensure that our schema stays valid according to our examples. It loads a series of test instance documents stored in tests/unit_test_files/should_pass and should_fail, and also tests against all examples in the examples folder.

It is written in Python, and can be run with:

$ python tests/specification_tests.py

Support

The IPTC Developer Site provides technical information about both SportsJS and SportsML, the XML version of this standard.

Please use the SportsML Users Forum mailing list to raise questions, or raise an issue on the SportsJS GitHub repository.