RE: 2014 Sports Proposal - V3

Thank you everyone for the tremendous amount of feedback.  Keep it coming.

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[Peter] What makes something a team sport?  Only teams compete in Nascar, not individuals, for example.  Pairs tennis is competed by two players, which might be considered to be a team.  There are team competitions in tennis. Are olympic sports contested by teams or by individuals?



[Peter] You have several olympic sports.  However, half of these are not actually olympic sports according to Wikipedia.  Snowboarding is a discipline of skiing, swimming is a displine of aquatics, track isn't even a discpline.



[Peter] What makes a sport professional?  Is that there are professional competitions in it?  Then just about everything listed as olympic sports are professional, but the "(additive)" seems to indicate otherwise.



I assume you're referring to the section of our proposal where we list the head sports we targeted.  If so, that organization was not a means of dictating how to categorize those sports, it was merely an illustration of mental model we used as we brainstormed an initial set of sports to consider.  Would you recommend we put a comment in the proposal specifically denoting this?





[Peter] Is a sport necessarily competitive?  Skiing is not necessarily competitive. Is recreational skiing a sport?  If not, you are using up a term for something that more naturally should be used for something else. Is a sport necessarily athletic?  Some non-athletic activites, e.g., chess, have governing bodies that belong to associations of sports governing bodies. What is a sport?  Is it a competitive activity that follows certain rules? This can't be, as just about every sport you list has variants that are played under different rules.  Is a sport something that has a governing body to codify several sets of rules?  This doesn't work either, as only a couple of the sports you list have particular governing bodies.  Is a sport something that people think of as a natural grouping?  This seems closer, but hockey doesn't fit here as ice hockey and field hockey are so very different.  Without some guidance as to what a sport is, how can there be any commonalities between what people use as sports?



I assume you are referring to the description we use for the proposed 'sport' property of a SportsOrganization? If so, how about we simply point at Wikipedia's definition?



[Peter] What makes a team a home team?  Is a home team the team that is most closely related to the venue?  What happens then when the New York Giants play the New York Jets?  Is instead a home team the team that is somehow designated by the rules of the competition as the home team?



It is the latter.  I will clarify.



[Peter] What is the decision for a tie?  What is the decision for a cricket draw?



[Thad] class of Decision - How is a tie in a resultDecision reflected ?  Can you give an example ?  I did not see one in the latest PDF.  Does that mean we possibly should have a tieDecision ... or is that too much ?   I want to express this, within the resultDecision iteself



Thinking through this more, if we have a 'WinDecision' and 'LoseDecision' then arguably we should have a 'DrawDecision' or 'TieDecision'.  That being said, we should also note what our guidance would be in cases where ties / draws happen in a given set of 'PlaceDecision' - e.g. "They tied for third and they tied for fifth place".  I think the answer is you simply use an array of 'PlaceDecision' with the same place value.  Welcome to further thoughts on this.



[Peter] Some sports governing bodies, including cricket, provide for different kinds of status situations for events.  For example, baseball games can be in various states for quite some time, including suspended and protested, and can end up never being officially completed.



Happy to hear additional recommendations for states.  Sounds like you are recommending we add 'EventSuspended' and 'EventUnderProtest'?



[Peter] Why is the range of sport Text?  This seems to invite abuse, with no way to recover.   Why not define a Class for sports, and let "things as strings" handle situations where text is used as a value?  The particular example of using a string that just happens to be the URL of a Wikipedia page only gets you the worst of both worlds.



[Gregg] I think the "sport" property is too specific, and a more generic "discipline" would be more generally applicable. Also, the range should be to an Intangible "Discipline", which might take instances from DBpedia, or some could be defined within schema.org<http://schema.org>. As always, it's acceptable to use plain text here as with other schema.org<http://schema.org> properties expecting an entity.



Agreed.  I had this same issue in 'Statistic' and fixed it by changing the range to 'Thing'.  I will look into doing something similar for 'Sport'.



[Peter] What is a coach?  Is a baseball (field) manager a coach?  Is a general manager a coach?  The answers here are fairly obvious, but it would be worthwhile, I think, to include some guidance.



It is the prior - the latter would be administration.  Will introduce more clarification.



[Peter] There are no separate classes for leagues or governing bodies, which are very important for almost all the sports you list, and are vitally important for the olympics.



The intent was to start simple and allow folks to leverage 'SportsOrganization' to describe things like leagues, conferences, divisions, governing bodies, etc.  Usage would then dictate which more specific types of sports organizations we would explicitly type.  I'm happy to hear arguments for being more proactive.  What would you suggest?



[Peter] There does not appear to be any way to discuss seasons or any other sort of multi-event competition except as sub-events, and Event is very poorly set up for anything besides a single-admission event.



[Tom] I think we're missing an attempt at modelling seasons. Here is an example of how we model seasons, using the notion of a Recurring Competition: https://gist.github.com/tfgrahame/f6c844301f814e075c12



[Gregg] I don't think we've adequately looked at seasons; In my model, a Season is a subclass of event (probably CompetitionEvent or SportsEvent, which contains the individual competitions taking place during that season. It's also useful for projecting player and coach references, which would be similar to those Roles having the same event start/end times, but better makes up a team roster for a given season. There are also other things that could be tagged to a Season, such as the name of the SportsTeam during this season, their venue and other things that may change over time.



The idea of an 'EventSeries' was in an earlier proposal but was pulled in light of (and in favor of) the separate and more generic 'ItemList' proposal.



[Peter] There does not appear to be any way to connect an sports event to the sport being played or to the sanctioning body of the event.



Both are good ideas.  We can update the domain of 'sport' to include SportsEvent and add a new property 'governingBody' within 'CompetitionEvent'.



[Jean-Pierre] But maybe the way it goes is an expression of frustration on how schenma.org works. I remember last time I saw something about sport was someone from bing saying in substance "thanks for the requirements, I am taking them and going away to work on a solution". So it seems that it went beyond the work on role. Not so encouraging to see a group of people working in the background and suddenly announcing "here it is" and finally not consider actually useful comments.



That would be me (from Bing).  The feedback from the January proposal made it clear that we needed to figure out our model for Roles and the relationship between Events and Statistics.  The changes since then have been more about applying the results of our underlying schema.org data model discussions than anything specific to Sports.  If there was specific feedback made that was not addressed in this latest version, I must have missed it and apologize for doing so.



Re: the feeling of "schema.org going away to work on a solution", I can appreciate your concerns, but as stated above this is fundamentally the same proposal that was developed and initially published in January.  That proposal was developed within the free-to-join sports vocabulary google group and includes input from non-schema.org folks like Tom (BBC) and Paul (SportsML) who generously volunteered their time.



[Antonio] In http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/SportsOrganization we can define the  property "sport" but many sport organizations are covering more than  one sport. Is there a way of solving this? Some kind of array instead of text.



The schema.org data model implicitly supports this because the value of all properties can be described using an array.  In other words, you can describe the same property multiple times within a specific instance of a class.



[Tom] SportsOrganization has a property of sport. This might be better as discipline. If Rugby is a sport, then Rugby League and Union might be disciplines.



Not clear what you saying here.  Do you mean we should have 'AmericanFootball' as a 'sport' and then 'Pro American Football' and 'College Football' as a 'discipline'?  I'm not familiar with the difference between Rugby League and Union.



[Tom] Statistic has thingMeasured and measuredValue. I wonder if we need a unit here too.



In the examples I think of, the unit of measure is implied by way of the 'thingMeasured' e.g. 'Interceptions', 'Strikes', 'Goals', 'Penalties', 'ERA'.  Can you share some examples where this wouldn't be sufficient?



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Re: Examples, I 100% agree that the more examples we have, the better, and I would encourage (plead!) for help from this community to establish them.  As Thad discovered, there are a limited set of examples in the PDF which are also represented in the test build site which we can start with.




From: Jason Johnson (BING) [mailto:jasjoh@microsoft.com]
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2014 2:57 PM
To: PublicVocabs
Cc: Tom Grahame; paul@xmlteam.com; Alice Swanberg
Subject: 2014 Sports Proposal - V3

All,

I'm pleased to formally announce and encourage review and feedback on an updated version of the 2014 Sports Vocabulary proposal that was originally shared earlier this year<http://blog.schema.org/2014/02/schemaorg-sports-vocabulary.html> in January.  This is the third (and hopefully final) major update to the proposal since then with major changes including:

- overhaul of the statistics and event results vocabulary and data model
- removal of the 'Event Series' vocabulary in favor of the more generic Itemlist proposal
- significant re-formatting to make the doc more readable
- alignment with the new Role based vocabulary and data model

A full list of changes can be found in the Change Log at the bottom of the exported PDF<https://www.w3.org/wiki/File:2014SportsVocab-v3.pdf>.

W3c Wiki Page: https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Sports
Exported PDF: https://www.w3.org/wiki/File:2014SportsVocab-v3.pdf

Below are links to some of the new terms within a test build of Schema.org.

http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/SportsOrganization
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/Statistic
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/SportsTeam
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/Decision
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/WinDecision
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/LoseDecision
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/SportsEvent
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/CompetitionEvent
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/Decision
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/PlaceDecision
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/DidNotFinishDecision
http://sdo-sports.appspot.com/EventCompleted

REGARDING FEEDBACK:  Although this effort originated in the schema.org sports collaboration google group<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sports-schema-collab>, in the interests of consolidated feedback, I encourage everyone to simply use this W3c based public-vocabs mailing list.

Cheers,

Jason Johnson
Microsoft | Bing