Best Data Format?

[Nibbles]

I've proposed a standard XML format, of which you can find in my footer:

Help standardize match data! Use the XML interchange format. (Specification page)

This sort of data is very well suited for the relational data model. For databases, I have tables containing each season, each event, each team for each season, each match, each alliance in each match (and their score), and each team in each match. I don't have too many unique IDs, multi-column primary keys works (for instance, the team-match primary key is indexed by (event, match, alliance, position) e.g. (300, 2, "R", 2) meaning event ID 300, second match, red alliance, second position in the alliance.

I might look at representing the data points with an RDF data model, a model that makes statements about resources (for instance, (X alliance) scored (x points), or (Y team) has a penalty "crossed the line")... It's still rather hard to use, but could be very cool for analytics.

If you have data you just want to get rid of, use CSV or JSON first, that's easiest to parse and can be converted into other formats with very little scripting.