Kunstenpunt (internationally known as Flanders Arts Institute) investigates how Belgian live music acts operate internationally. To gather the data, we developed a process to aggregate concert information from online gig finder platforms, i.e. Songkick, setlist.fm, Bands in Town en Facebook (events). The process incorporates human-assisted cleaning algorithms and duplicate recognition. In addition, we keep a channel open to report concert info manually, and there has been an effort to do "one off" imports of podiuminfo.nl, festivalinfo.nl, and the now defunct Arts Flanders agenda (not yet implemented).
Information about artists, including their identity on Songkick, Bands in Town, Setlist.fm and Facebook, is collected via the open database musicbrainz.org. Based on the identify information for the gig finder platforms in Musicbrainz, we can use the APIs of the gig finder platforms to gather the concert data.
The gathered data needs to be cleaned:
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within platform
- we have to consider artists with the same name whose concerts are reported as coming from the same artist
- we have to handle artists that perform under several names
- infer cancellations of concerts
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across platforms
- we have to deduplicate concerts that are announced on several platforms
- we have to harmonize venue names, place names, city names and country names
We are powerless against faulty reported data, but we do a best effort to clean up errors automatically. Nonetheless, there is the possibility to inform Flanders Arts Institute about errors. We have built in mechanisms to be able to allow for manually correcting the data.
- https://blog.kunsten.be/grabbing-the-data-concerts-abroad-52144547e1e1
- https://blog.kunsten.be/4-things-you-didnt-know-about-flemish-musicians-on-tour-b9a579ce82b4
- https://blog.kunsten.be/bored-in-the-usa-4f5afbc4b1b9
- https://blog.kunsten.be/internationaal-doorbreken-for-dummies-deel-1-volgens-het-boekje-5eec522853cc
- https://blog.kunsten.be/internationaal-doorbreken-for-dummies-deel-2-leren-van-de-ondergrond-121155b888e9
- https://blog.kunsten.be/beren-gieren-ook-buiten-de-landsgrenzen-ed85dd23dc7c
- https://blog.kunsten.be/whos-playing-where-be7e9da5c11f
- https://blog.kunsten.be/building-a-visual-tool-to-explore-where-belgian-artists-perform-concerts-abroad-25b876b605c9
- https://blog.kunsten.be/touring-abroad-10aba1c7f133