How to represent the "Artist" concept in Artsdata

[fjjulien]

In the performing arts sector, the term "Artist" is often used to equally designate an individual artist (i.e. a person), a band, a collective, a troupe, an artistic company or any other group that is directly involved in the creation and performance of performing arts works. All major industry platforms have an equivalent concept named either "Performer" (IWTS), "Artist" (ATC), "Artiste" (Scènes francophones) or "Artiste(s) sur scène" (Scène Pro).

This concept does not exist in Artsdata. Values expected for the schema performer property must be either a Person or an Organization.

When asked to implement an additionalType field in their user interface to distinguish different kinds of artists and given the choice between the Person/Organization dichotomy or something, else platform operators prefer to have three distinct subtypes:

1. solo/individual artist
2. group/band/collective (an informal organization)
3. organization/company (a formal organization)

Should we seek to represent the "Artist" concept and its three subtypes in Artsdata?

A few thoughts and related questions:

1. If/when other platforms such as the Arts Touring Connector start calling the Artsdata API to retrieve Artist/Performer type entities, the efficiency of this process will depend on the number of entities with which text strings must be reconciled. With the present data model, we would need to reconcile with all Person and Organization entities, which would not be super efficient (imagine an auto-complete feature and the user is proposed presenter names when they are seeking an artist's name). Since the data we get from IWTS and Scènes francophones comes in with a "Performer" or «Artiste» and the understand of the concept is pretty similar in the two platforms, should we seek to transform this data into RDF, for example by declaring an additionalType in the Artsdata data model?
2. What would a proper type be for an informal organization (a band or collective)?
3. Since schema:PerformingGroup is a subtype of Organization and it is stated to be equivalent to performing arts group (Q105815710), this type could apply equally to a band and to a dance company. The use of PerformingGroup and Organization to distinguish the two collective Performer types in IWTS is therefore not semantically meaningful (which is why we have not bothered making a distinction in Artsdata). If we want to integrate a semantic nuance in Artsdata between a band and a company, should we add an extra triple statement that would set them apart from one another? Could we for example state additionalType: adr:PerformingArtsCompany for IWTS organizations? It's not a bad option, but our controlled vocabulary does not explicitly define adr:PerformingArtsCompany as a juridical persons. What about org:FormalOrganization?

[fjjulien]

This question was addressed in discussion #131 and #130.

Rather than declaring an "Artist" class, we decided to use dbo:Agent as a superclass.