I Want To Showcase Data Serves the Live Performance Industry

I Want To Showcase partners are proud to announce a new initiative that will contribute to the streamlining of the entire live performance value chain.

As of this fall, IWTS is rolling out a new Open Data Policy. This policy gives solo artists, bands and artistic companies the opportunity to transform their IWTS performer profile information into publicly available open data, in partnership with the Artsdata knowledge graph.

This open data will be made accessible for reuse by other industry platforms, ticketing service providers, and presenters as well. Additionally, this open data will link to other open knowledge bases such as Wikidata. This, in turn, will give each participating artist a boost in their digital discoverability.

Why open performer data matters 

By releasing non-sensitive information as open data, self-representing artists, artistic companies and agents/managers can spend less time doing manual entry. Instead, they can let the robots do the work for them: making connections across the performer’s digital footprint and “filling in the blanks” on various platforms.

Open data also enables search engine and AI robots to “understand” key information about performers: their name(s), primary work location, official website, and so on. This way, robots are more likely to deliver accurate search results about performers and recommend them to artsgoers.

Furthermore, presenters can incorporate open performer data into their own open event data (more information below). This strategy can boost the discoverability of both artists and their live performances. In fact, this is how data is fed to CAPACOA’s recently launched Calendar of Events Featuring Performances by Indigenous Artists.

How to join this open data initiative

Performers who wish to take advantage of this new open data initiative only need to log in to IWTS, update their performer profile and confirm that they consent to the open data policy. 

When you update your performer profile, you will see a few new questions. You will be asked to specify if the performer profile is for a solo artist, performing group/band or organization (i.e artistic company). For solo artists, you will also have the opportunity to disclose the artist’s province or territory of birth. As explained in this post and in recent Artsdata digital presence workshops, provenance information can help AI clearly identify an artist. It can also support territorial marketing efforts by governments and tourism associations.  

Find out more.

Tip for presenters

Integrating open performer data from I Want To Showcase into your open event data is fairly easy:

1. Go to kg.artsdata.ca.
2. Search the artist’s, performing group’s or organization’s name.
3. Copy the URI under the performer’s name (the URL that begins with http://kg.artsdata.ca/resource/).
4. Paste this URI in your event Schema structured data under the property “performer”: “sameAs”.

Since this URI is linked to the performer’s I Want To Showcase profile, adding just this single data point into your event structured data is the equivalent of embedding the entire I Want To Showcase profile.

If you are not sure how to add this data point to your event data, contact us. We’ll be happy to guide you.

Acknowledgement

I Want To Showcase’s Open Data Policy 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.

Authors: Frédéric Julien and Dessa Hayes.