[open-heritage] Theatricalia

[ianibbo at gmail.com]

Hey All.. this is really interesting. A couple of years ago I was
involved in a JISC project called national performance database (NPDB)
that collated data from lots of sources like the RSC and UK Theatre
Web. I think at the time we had about 90000 works, 770000 listings,
124000 productions and 120000 people along with 2942 venues. We tried
incredibly hard to take the project forward and open up the data at
the end of the demonstrator phase, but we couldn't sort out the
licensing. That was 2 years ago, and things have moved on a lot since
then. I wonder if it's worth reapproaching some of the data providers
to see if they would consent to gifting the data to this project.
We've still got it all in a machine readable format, so techincally
there shouldn't be an issue.

Also, it's probably well worth getting in touch with the guys at UK
Theatre Web. Their business model is based on current productions, but
they have an amazing archive. I wonder if they could be persuaded to
automatically inject records into this database at the end of a
production run?

I'd be really interested in taking some of this data and merging it
with the National Performance Database to see how the shape of the
data might change. Anyone know what the provenance of the data in
theatricalia already is? I presume it's bootstrapped from some
external source?

Cheers
Ian.

On 2 December 2010 11:50, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> Cool! Please do get in touch with them. And would be *great* if you
> could create CKAN package if you had a moment!
>
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
>> http://theatricalia.com/
>>
>> "Hello and welcome to Theatricalia, a database of past and future theatre
>> productions.
>>
>> Features
>> * Anyone can add a production if it’s not on the site, or fix mistakes.
>> * Each place, person, and play has an RSS feed or email alert, so you can
>> keep up to date with what something or someone is doing.
>> * Search for a person, play, place, or part; or search for a location to
>> find things near you.
>>
>> Theatricalia knows about 61,192 people being cast and crew in 257,395 rôles,
>> in 19,097 productions of 10,376 plays at 1,542 places."
>>
>> This looks great. Does anyone know them? I checked the site and couldn't see
>> any Open Data declaration, so I'll get in touch if nobody else has.
>>
>> - Rob.
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
>
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-- 
Ian Ibbotson
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