XML Interchange format

[Nibbles]

At the very least, this is what I will be using as a data backup mechanism (moving away from SQL dumps). I hope other people gather the time to implement it and post their data in this format as well.

It is generic, and allows for not just FRC, but FTC and FLL as well, it allows for team number or information changes, since it keeps data per season, not once for all of history. It allows for score components to be posted and attributed to multiple teams. It is flexible enough to allow for more then two alliances, or varying numbers of teams per alliance. In many events, I have both the score and penalty components posted, and for some events I have more fine-grained data: scored points, bonus, and penalties, all seperate (which will appear in the dump when I get around to importing the score components into my database).

The dump of all the data I have will appear at http://team498.org/scouting/data/latest.frc.xml


Technical mumble follows.

The specification for the format appears at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcz67k4q_38f2rp7sfc. If anyone is interested in helping engineer the details of the format PM me, or visit me on IRC (see my footer), I can add you as an editor to the document. You should have good problem-solving skills, think about different situations that the format might be used in, know about XML and it's related technologies (XQuery, XPath, XSLT, namespaces), and be familiar with RFC 2119 and when to use each keyword. Basically, be able to think: is there a reason a certain feature should be required, is there any reason that someone might need to leave an attribute out, how should parsers deal with missing data, etc.

Talking with other people about this, there was some concern over the selection of XML as the data format. While XML is certainly not appropriate for everything (including RPC calls imo), it really stands out for FIRST data because it is human readable, can be queried for data with XQuery (if you want to do statistics for example), it can be easily transformed into other formats (you could generate static HTML pages using XSL), and it has namespace support, so it can be extended. Using namespaces, you could link to game videos (<v:video href="http://firstvideoarchive.com/2008Archive/index.php?dir=Arizona/&file=az_qf2m3.wmv"/> for example) or game data specific to one season, you can add a s2008:laps="4" or s2007:lift="498:12 330:4" attribute to each team element under each match, to record laps a robot made or if it lifted any other robots.

You could write a program that stores competition data using a native XML database, e.g. http://xml.apache.org/xindice/ or http://exist.sourceforge.net/
(I think it might be slow, but who knows, it might be innovative).