| New York, USA, 7 November 2002 -- A
new computer language to describe sports results was released
to the public at the Sports Media and Technology trade
show here.
Sports Markup Language, or SportsML, is a standard
created by the International Press Telecommunications
Council (IPTC), an association of the world's major
news agencies.
SportsML breaks sports data into bite-sized pieces
and allows publishers to completely describe the how,
what, when, where and why of sports. Documents in SportsML
can be as simple or as complex as needed, drawing from
a wide range of available descriptions for sports scores,
schedules, standings and statistics.
Team and player names, results, standings and other
important information are handled in a standardized
way, greatly reducing the tedious editing process that
is often required to prepare sports results for publication.
League data can also be stored in SportsML, making
standings and playoff results easier to handle.
The IPTC approved SportsML version 1.0 draft at its
October meeting in Amsterdam. Final ratification of
the standard is expected at the next regular IPTC meeting
in March 2003 in Nice, France. Members of the IPTC
include: The Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, The New
York Times, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Press-Agentur,
Reuters, Sweden's Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, and Pinnacor
(formerly Screaming Media).
At the autumn meeting in Amsterdam, The New York Times
announced its support for SportsML. The newspaper industry
has been waiting years for something like SportsML,
said Walter Baranger of The New York Times. We expect
to use it as soon as it is available from our sports
data services.
SportsML's goal is to expand opportunities for interactive
sports publishing, making it less expensive to produce
and manage data, and easier to create compelling sports
applications, said Alan Karben of Pinnacor, chairman
of the SportsML initiative.
SportsML is a dialect of a worldwide standard formatting
language known as XML, and its data can be easily exported
to hand-held devices, the World Wide Web, newspaper
publishing systems, or sports archives. As a part of
the XML programming family, SportsML adheres to benchmarks
set down by W3C, the organization that sets the standards
for the World Wide Web.
The SportsML support and information Web site is http://www.SportsML.com
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