A License for match data, and the addition of the Venue Register - Cricsheet

Posted: 7th of October, 2026
Today I’m announcing two different additions to the site. Both I’ve been asked for multiple times, and I’ve finally got around to providing them.
One major oversight of this project is that I’ve never previously indicated the license under which the match data could be used (other than the XML data which has always been available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License). Today I’m finally righting that wrong. Henceforth the match data (other than the aforementioned XML data) will be available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License, the same license used for the Register.
All download zip files from now on will include a copy of the license (in LICENSE.txt) and the site has been updated to have a licensing page. The addition of the license isn’t intended to change your existing use of the data. If you use the data now I would be very surprised if anything in the license would preclude that, however if you feel that it does do get in touch and I’ll see what I can do. You should have a read of the license, but I’ll include the human-readable summary of the license below to give you a sense of what it involves. Obviously this is not the license itself, it’s just a handy reference, do read the full license.
Five years ago I released the Cricsheet Register to provide a unique identifier for players and officials featured in Cricsheet data files, along with details on identifiers used for those people across multiple cricket-related websites/sources). Since then I’ve been asked for, and intended to provide, a similar register for venues, but I never found the time. Well, I’ve finally found some time to start the project. Today the Register is expanding to include a Venue Register. This new register provides the same data format for venues as the existing register (henceforth referred to as the People Register) does for people.
Each venue in the Venue Register receives a unique identifier and name, along with a list of other names by which the venue is known. A venue that has had multiple names might appear in the venue field in the data files with any of those different names but it will always have the same ID in the Venue Register, and that ID will be included in the new venues addition to the registry data in the appropriate data files.
At the moment the data only appears in data files for matches that have been added since I started working on this particular project, and the Venue Register itself contains a limited number of venues. As new venues are encountered when adding new matches I will add each one to the Register. I also have work in-progress to add all of the venues used in the data files to the Register, as well as adding a venue registry to each data file without one.
The addition of the venue registry to the data files has unsurprisingly resulted in the version numbers for each data format being updated. The JSON format has changed to 1.3.0, YAML and XML to 0.94, CSV (Ashwin format) to 2.4.0, and CSV (original format) to 1.9.0. You can find all of the details on the changes on the documentation pages for each format: JSON, YAML, XML, CSV (Ashwin), and CSV (original).