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Map of northern Canada with various icons, such as "house", "briefcase" and "heart" icons, over different towns, cities and regions.

Bill C-11 has been on a lot of minds since it passed Parliament and became law last spring. Also called the Online Streaming Act, it promises enhanced discoverability opportunities for Canadian content creators on platforms like YouTube, Spotify and Netflix.

But in order for these platform’s new algorithms to recommend Canadian content, they need to be told which creators are, in fact, Canadian. This is where provenance metadata comes into play.

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More often than not, artsgoers of all ages are discovering new artists, shows and festivals through some sort of digital device. Whether they’re searching “events near me” on Google or asking Alexa to find a playlist that fits their mood, they increasingly look no further beyond what their device (and the algorithm behind it) recommends.

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The Linked Digital Future initiative (LDFI), as we have known it until now, is giving way to an exciting new project, thanks to funding from the Canada Council of the Arts and the Government of Canada’s Canada Cultural Investment Fund and Community Services Recovery Fund. A project that will continue to enhance the discoverability of the performing arts, while growing and strengthening the community surrounding the Artsdata knowledge graph. We call it the Artsdata Linked Open Data Ecosystem

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Tablet showing a graph of the number and sources of events in Artsdata, beside the LDFI logo and "Annual Report 2022-2023). There are abstract, interlinked diamond shapes in the background.

The Linked Digital Future initiative was launched in 2018 to promote the discoverability of the live performance sector. After just over four years, has this discoverability challenge remained just as critical? Or has increasingly advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) solved the problem for us?

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Indigenous artists have historically been underrepresented or inaccurately represented in library catalogs and in knowledge sharing platforms such as Wikipedia. The latest report from the Linked Digital Future Initiative addresses this issue in relation to Wikidata, an open knowledge base that is part of the Wikimedia movement. 

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CAPACOA is thrilled to announce that the LIVE Performing Arts Directory is now (in fact) live!

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2021-2022 was another great year for the Linked Digital Future Initiative.

In spite (or because) of the pandemic, we achieved significant progress in the production of open metadata about named entities in the last year. The number of artists in the Artsdata knowledge graph increased by 108%. The number of organizations, by 163%. And more data population activities are underway to increase the amount of data about places by at least as much. Moreover, we are finally looking forward to shifting the focus back to event metadata now that the sector is fully reopened after two years of running closures.

Metatada means “data about the data”. In the performing arts, metadata can provide useful descriptive information about artists, organizations, venues and performances.

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“How could the works of Indigenous arts and culture practitioners be more readily findable to people looking for them over the Web?” There are many potential answers to this question. Yet, each one is dependent on answering another, more fundamental, question: “Who are Indigenous arts and culture practitioners?” or, to be more precise, “how can these practitioners be accurately and respectfully identified as being Indigenous?”

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Linked Digital Future - Un avenir numérique lié Successes and lessons learned in year one

As we wrap up a busy first phase of the Linked Digital Future initiative, we’d like to share a few successes and lessons learned with the performing arts community.

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Over the last year, CAPACOA and Culture Creates collaborated with the Bern University of Applied Sciences to develop a conceptual model for performing arts data. At the same time, Culture Creates was building the artsdata.ca knowledge graph, and RIDEAU was rolling out the Scène Pro information system. The former assembles data about performances; the latter gathers data about organizations, venues and performing arts productions. What if the two datasets were interoperable and could exchange data? We tried it out.

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