QuizML

I've been asked about QuizML a lot this week. More than the rest of year, actually. So I've put together this page as a combined FAQ and commentary.

QuizML, as the name suggests, is a markup language to describe quiz questions in a structured manner. A typical question would appear thus:

<question difficulty="3">
<q>Who was the guitarist in Queen?</q>
<a id="2"/>
<opt>Freddie Mercury</opt>
<opt>Brian May</opt>
<opt>John Deacon</opt>
<opt>Roger Taylor</opt>
</question>

As you can see the format is straight forward, providing an arbitrary number of multiple choice answers, the correct one, and a dificulty level. These are all wrapped up in a top-level element,

<quiz-questions topic="music">

and supplemented with head information such as the quiz name, its license, and so on.

The benefit of structure data is that it's easy to then produce a suitable output for your application, or quiz night. I have written XSLT (translation stylesheets) to convert a QuizML file into:

Here is a Free Quiz of the Day using the interactive HTML page.

I have also supplied some quizes under the CC attribution license, so anyone may use them in TV, radio, and computer quiz games, provided they credit me on-screen (or on-air in the case of radio and podcasts) as a question setter. If you don't want to credit me, then you can email me and we'll discuss an alternative license.

The current quizes available are:

The current status of this project can be found at the QuizML main page.