As a programmer and Linux user who is also a sports fan (rare combination, I know), I very often make efforts to analyze sports scores in various ways. I previously ran a site here that provided an implementation of “adjusted scoring margin”, which I originally read about on some professional sports site, but the actual ratings were for subscribers only. More recently, I’m interested in expanding my use of linear programming and statistical sampling to analyze playoff scenarios and playoff percentages.

One barrier to working on this is good access to score data for the various sports. There are a few good resources, like Massey Ratings, that can help to facilitate this, but some of the data is outdated and doesn’t necessarily have all the information I want. For my previous site, I wrote a script that parsed results from various live sources on the web, but I think we can do better than that.

To that end, I’ve launched a new project I’ve (tentatively) named the Penultimate Reality Sports Data Project, which aims to provide free and open access to sports score data for as many sports as possible and as many years as possible. The only thing real content I’ve put so far is an older draft of the specification for the data format that I originally wrote a couple of years ago. (I temporarily shelved the project after that.) That said, I’ve come to want to relaunch it, and if anyone out there is interested in helping in any way, please get in contact with me. Otherwise, I’ll press on alone and hope somebody finds my work useful. I at the very least hope to get a new draft of the specification online by this time next week. We shall see.

For those of you who primarily want to read about programming and Linux… well, uh, sorry. Maybe next post. This is my personal blog, after all.

UPDATE: I had some time to kill, so I went ahead and revised the specification. The changes weren’t incredibly substantial, but I am now actively seeking comments. Whether or not I get any is another question altogether.

Tags: data, scores, sports

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.