RugbyScope: a Transfer-Oriented Database of Rugby Union Teams and Players

Overview & Synopsis

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 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.