Contrary to what others have stated here, the format should be able to accomodate actual game scores. This is another reason why the format should be based on PGN.
While in the traditional weekend OTB tournament, the game scores are not captured, they are in higher-level “pro” events which attract an audience on the internet. New technologies, such as the Monroi and the DGT board, are being introduced to facilitate the capture of the game scores. Moreover, it is short-sighted to consider OTB tournaments as the only source of tournament games which the USCF might wish to rate or capture in its database. What about Internet-based events, in which game scores are easily and routinely captured? Events on both real-time and correspondence style servers are increasingly popular. The number of games being played on these servers already vastly outnumbers OTB games. This is a format for OTB tournament results, but isn’t that a declining part of the chess “market”? We don’t have to worry only about WinTD and SwissSys. What about FICS, or ICC?
One can also foresee the need for both “live” or in-progress results from a tournament and “final” results. Wouldn’t we like to stream information out of in progress tournaments and display both game scores (including in-progress games) and current standings from the tournaments? What about pairings for yet-to-be-played rounds? In many tournament formats, such as round-robins, the pairings for the entire tournament are known before the first round.
There should not be one format for capturing a set of game scores and another format for capturing “tournament” information. There should not be one format for reporting “live” or in progress results and final results. There should not be one format for capturing OTB events, another for correspondence events, and yet another for real-time Internet events.
Some of the posters in this thread have insisted that “tournament” information and “game” information are fundamentally different somehow and that PGN would be a “hideous” mismatch with the requirements. They have not given any technical arguments for this insistence, perhaps hoping that their vehemence, sarcasm, and condescension towards any other point of view will carry the day. (A rather typical rhetorical move on this forum, and amongst technical people generally.)
But what is the profound difference between “tournament results” and a set of related game results? What is a tournament if not a set of related games? There are indeed some tournament level attributes, such as the name and USCFId of the TD, but there is much to be gained from propagating these values into each game, since each game in a file containing multiple game results can then potentially stand alone and be split out, stored independently in a database like Chessbase, or processed independently without any dependencies on external data sources containing the “tournament-level” information. Thus, putting the Arbiter or TD’s name into each game does not bother me. Indeed, it seems to me to have advantages. In database terms, this PGN style approach results in data being denormalized in the feed. The name of the Chief TD doesn’t change during the tournament but with the game-centric approach it will occur multiple times in the feed, in each game. But there is no harm from that in a computer-generated data export, and some advantages. If we have to worry about file size (which is unlikely) it can be taken care of by compression, and anyway, XML isn’t a great choice either if byte-efficient transmission is an issue.
The only problem I see in the PGN approach of propagating most of the tournament level information into each game is that there are some fields that are truly tournament level and which can only be awkwardly propagated to the game level. For example, there are the final tournament standings of the players (with the tie-break calculations), prizes, etc. It seems fairly obvious that you would not want the information about all the winners of the tournament being carted around in each game (though the pre- and post-game tournament standings of the two players in a game does seem like very interesting per-game information and could be represented without problem in a PGN format). Another example is team standings. While the Team names of the players can be propagated to the games, the standings of all the teams in a team-oriented tournament is not information that you want to see each game carting around.
However, I don’t see anything about tie-break information in the proposed XML format, or indeed very many fields at all that could not reasonably be propagated to the game level, and of those very few fields, some of them seem like frills.
These fields that are truly at the tournament level and which can’t be carted around in the games are problems for the PGN approach. But the advantages of a single format capable of representing game scores and “tournament” information argues for me in favor of propagating everything reasonable to a game PGN-formatted game level, with the truly tournament level information handled through the PGN escaping mechanism.
