RugbyScope: a transfer-oriented database of rugby union teams and players

IF 1.9 Q3 MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES

Data in Brief Pub Date : 2026-08-01 Epub Date: 2026-09-04 DOI:10.1016/j.dib.2026.113231

Vincent Labatut, David J.P. O'Sullivan

{"title":"RugbyScope: a transfer-oriented database of rugby union teams and players","authors":"Vincent Labatut, David J.P. O'Sullivan","doi":"10.1016/j.dib.2026.113231","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The increasing availability of Web data creates new opportunities for studying the history and organization of sports. However, it also raises major challenges regarding data integration, completeness, and consistency. In this work, we introduce <em>RugbyScope</em>, a comprehensive database of rugby union players, teams, and stints. It was built by aggregating data from two open knowledge bases (Wikidata, DBpedia) and five language editions of Wikipedia, carefully selected to cover all the main rugby union nations. Building such a resource requires addressing several challenges, including heterogeneous data structures across sources, incomplete coverage, and inconsistencies between records describing the same entities. We propose a processing pipeline that extracts data from different sources, formats, and languages, that implements a merging strategy based on data consistency constraints, source agreement, and manually validated heuristics. The resulting database provides a structured and unified representation of rugby union careers, including player information, team histories, and career stints. RugbyScope currently focuses on men's rugby union and achieves a higher coverage of professional clubs worldwide. Although some limitations remain regarding source completeness and historical depth, we provide a reproducible framework and an openly documented methodology for constructing large-scale sports databases from heterogeneous Web sources. RugbyScope is intended as a research resource for studying the evolution, structure, and global dynamics of rugby union.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":10973,"journal":{"name":"Data in Brief","volume":"69 ","pages":"Article 113231"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9000,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Data in Brief","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235234092600778X","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2026/9/4 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The increasing availability of Web data creates new opportunities for studying the history and organization of sports. However, it also raises major challenges regarding data integration, completeness, and consistency. In this work, we introduce RugbyScope, a comprehensive database of rugby union players, teams, and stints. It was built by aggregating data from two open knowledge bases (Wikidata, DBpedia) and five language editions of Wikipedia, carefully selected to cover all the main rugby union nations. Building such a resource requires addressing several challenges, including heterogeneous data structures across sources, incomplete coverage, and inconsistencies between records describing the same entities. We propose a processing pipeline that extracts data from different sources, formats, and languages, that implements a merging strategy based on data consistency constraints, source agreement, and manually validated heuristics. The resulting database provides a structured and unified representation of rugby union careers, including player information, team histories, and career stints. RugbyScope currently focuses on men's rugby union and achieves a higher coverage of professional clubs worldwide. Although some limitations remain regarding source completeness and historical depth, we provide a reproducible framework and an openly documented methodology for constructing large-scale sports databases from heterogeneous Web sources. RugbyScope is intended as a research resource for studying the evolution, structure, and global dynamics of rugby union.

查看原文本刊更多论文

RugbyScope：一个面向橄榄球联盟球队和球员的转移数据库

Web数据的日益可用性为研究体育运动的历史和组织创造了新的机会。然而，它也提出了关于数据集成、完整性和一致性的主要挑战。在这项工作中，我们介绍了RugbyScope，一个橄榄球联盟球员，球队和期限的综合数据库。它是通过汇总来自两个开放知识库（维基数据、DBpedia）和维基百科五种语言版本的数据而构建的，这些数据经过精心挑选，涵盖了所有主要的橄榄球联盟国家。构建这样的资源需要解决几个挑战，包括跨数据源的异构数据结构、不完整的覆盖以及描述相同实体的记录之间的不一致性。我们提出了一个从不同来源、格式和语言中提取数据的处理管道，该管道实现了基于数据一致性约束、源协议和手动验证启发式的合并策略。由此产生的数据库提供了橄榄球联盟职业生涯的结构化和统一表示，包括球员信息、球队历史和职业生涯。RugbyScope目前专注于男子橄榄球联盟，并在全球范围内实现了更高的职业俱乐部覆盖率。尽管在源完整性和历史深度方面仍然存在一些限制，但我们提供了一个可重复的框架和一个公开记录的方法，用于从异构Web源构建大型体育数据库。RugbyScope旨在作为研究橄榄球联盟演变、结构和全球动态的研究资源。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Data in Brief MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES-

CiteScore

3.10

自引率

0.00%

发文量

996

审稿时长

70 days

期刊介绍： Data in Brief provides a way for researchers to easily share and reuse each other''s datasets by publishing data articles that: -Thoroughly describe your data, facilitating reproducibility. -Make your data, which is often buried in supplementary material, easier to find. -Increase traffic towards associated research articles and data, leading to more citations. -Open up doors for new collaborations. Because you never know what data will be useful to someone else, Data in Brief welcomes submissions that describe data from all research areas.