Release of information as open data
The CAPACOA membership form was designed to collect authoritative information about member organizations and member artists for the purpose of enhancing their digital presence across the Web and digital platforms.
Excluding personal contact information, any identifying member information and member profile information (i.e. descriptive information) submitted over the CAPACOA membership form may be:
- Used by CAPACOA for other purposes that comply with the association’s mission, including but not limited to research;
- Translated into machine-readable structured data;
- Assigned unique persistent identifiers;
- Interlinked with other data from open knowledge bases and from authoritative public sources (including your own website);
- Released as open data under Creative Commons CC0 license (or more restrictive licenses) in open knowledge bases (including CAPACOA’s membership directory, the Artsdata knowledge graph, and Wikidata).
Once member information is released as linked open data under Creative Commons license, it will be available for reuse by other parties for other purposes as well.
Benefits of open data
There are many potential benefits to this open data strategy:
- The CAPACOA Membership Form is your one-stop open data publishing tool. One click and the information about who are and what you do is propelled to open knowledge bases. Even better: if you manage a venue, CAPACOA staff will take care of making it easily findable via both the world wide web and the open data cloud.
- Search engines love information about clearly identifiable entities. Releasing authoritative member information as linked open data is an effective way to help Google and Bing carve a place for you in their knowledge graph.
- Member information published as linked open data can be automatically combined with complementary information about venues, events and productions. Once assembled, this rich information can feed into directories and events listings. Search engines can display rich results. Recommender systems can point art goers to the event that matches their interests.
- Manually populating forms takes time, doesn’t it? Whenever open data is reused by CAPACOA or other parties, technology does the hard work, not you.
Other benefits are illustrated in this Linked Open Data Overview by the Canadian Heritage Information Network.
Data quality
The CAPACOA membership form is an opportunity for you to exercise ownership and control over how your organization information is represented over the Web. It is your responsibility to ensure that the information is accurate,complete, and up to date.
Display of member data in the LIVE Performing Arts Directory
Since CAPACOA’s LIVE Performing Arts Directory is entirely powered by open data, your consent is required in order to transform your membership information into open data, and then to display it in the directory. If you do not consent to the Membership Open Data Strategy, we will not be able to display your member information in the directory. More information.
Definitions
Basic consent option includes the following information.
Identifying information
| For organizational members | For individual members |
| – Operational or usual name(s) – Legal name – Also known as name(s) – Business number – Legal form – Charitable status | – First name(s) – Last name(s) – Stage name |
Member profile information
| For organizational members | For individual members |
| – Primary activity – Discipline(s)/genre(s) – Presentation format (if applicable) – Official website – Venue owned/operated (if applicable) – Municipality, province/territory, country | – Occupation – Discipline(s)/genre(s) – Official website – Municipality, province/territory, country |
Consent options
- Basic consent: I agree with the terms of the open data strategy (i.e., I consent to the disclosing of member information, excluding contact information).
- Extended consent: I agree with the terms of the open data strategy AND I further consent to the disclosing of contact information, including contact persons’ name(s), work email address(es) and work phone numbers.
- No, thanks: I do not agree with the terms of the open data strategy, but I would still like to become a CAPACOA member. I understand that, without my consent, my member information will not be displayed in the CAPACOA membership directory.
About this Open Data Strategy
The CAPACOA Membership Open Data Strategy was designed as part of the Linked Digital Future Initiative, which is funded by the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.
This Open Data Strategy is available for reuse under a Creative Commons CC0 license. We encourage other associations and arts service organizations to adopt a similar strategy.
If you have questions about this Open Data Strategy, you may contact CAPACOA’s Director of Research and Development, Frédéric Julien.
Release date: March 25, 2022