With an ever-growing catalogue of touring shows, presenters regularly request new artists and shows to be added to the Arts Touring Connector, a shared block-booking platform. Rather than asking users to search the web and manually fill out information for these new artists, the ATC turned to Artsdata to quite literally “fill in the gaps.”
The Arts Touring Connector partners are proud to announce the Open Data Initiative. Thanks to this initiative, ATC users can now easily retrieve an artist profile from the Artsdata knowledge graph. This means that when you type in an artist’s name, Artsdata will auto-complete your search and display matching results, along with a short description of each one. Then, you need only click “Add”, and watch as the artist’s profile is imported to the ATC.
The imported data will include the artist’s website, location and biography, along with provenance information indicating the source of the data. Artsdata provides access to more than 140 open data sources, including I Want To Showcase, Wikidata and Wikipedia. This represents more than 5 million data points.
“This is a wonderful example of data reuse along the performing arts value chain: artist and presenter data created in other industry platforms can now be linked to tour information generated in ATC. As data is linked and reused across platforms, it is also enriched with additional data points. This rich data is then more likely to be recommended by Google and other search and discovery engines. It’s precisely what our sector needs to succeed in the age of AI!”
– Frédéric Julien, Director of Research and Development, CAPACOA
Clearly identified artists
In addition to filling in standard ATC fields, Artsdata will also deliver persistent identifiers, which clearly identify artists, presenters and performance spaces across the web of open data. These identifiers include the Wikidata ID, the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), and Artsdata’s own K ID. If you or your web developer codes Schema structured data on your website, we encourage you to read Artsdata’s documentation to learn how to make good use of these identifiers. By integrating identifiers into your structured data, you can help search engines better recognize the main performer(s), the official presenter, and the exact location of your performances.
A win-win partnership
This data exchange works both ways, with ATC sending artist, organization and venue data back to Artsdata. Artsdata then transforms this information into linked open data and makes it available for reuse in other applications and by search engines.
At this time, ATC is only sharing public, non-sensitive artist, representative, presenter and performance space information with Artsdata. Sensitive information, such as contact information and transactional information, is not meant to be disclosed as linked open data.
If you have any questions about the ATC Open Data Initiative, please do not hesitate to contact your block-booking coordinator.
Acknowledgement
The Arts Touring Connector’s Open Data Initiative was developed and implemented as part of the Artsdata project. This project is funded by the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.
