Declaring a "Performing Artist" class in Artsdata

[fjjulien]

This discussion is related to #130

Background

As a recent CAPACOA report found, many industry platforms have a concept designating an "artist" or "performer" agent that can be either a schema:Person or schema:Organization (or subclass thereof).

Specific use case

The Arts Touring Connector (ATC) is a platform designed to facilitate the planning of show tours. This process, known as "block programming", is carried out by presenting organizations and the networks that support them. Two key classes closely associated with the Tour concept in the ATC data model are: Artist and Show. As a first step in the ATC-Artsdata integration, ATC would like their users to be able to autocomplete Artist names against Artsdata entities.

Problem

Artsdata does not have an equivalent class to the ATC Artist class. Therefore ATC developers must reconcile Artists twice: once against Person type entities, and once against Organization type entities. The same problem may also be experienced as I Want To Showcase starts reconciling "Performer" entities with Artsdata.

Solution

As an immediate solution, discussion #130 is proposing to to integrate an "Agent" class into the Artsdata data model.

As longer-term solution, we may want to declare a narrower class (i.e. a subclass of "Agent") that would define a range for the schema:performer in Artsdata. In other words, the class would designate a person, group or organization that one could expect to see as the main performer in an event.

This class could automatically be assigned when certain conditions are met. For example:

• An entity has the "Artist" class in the Arts Touring Connector;
• An entity had the "Performer" class in I Want To Showcase;
• An entity has the "Artiste" class in Scènes francophones;
• An entity is stated a performer of an event in event structure data and the structured data includes a sameAs pointing to a URI clearly identifying this entity.