Gigs in Fluidinfo

I’ve written previously on about-tag conventions for music in Fluidinfo, and if you search for almost any artist or album in Fluidinfo you’ll see the great progress that Eric Seidel (@gridaphobe) has already made in this area, with more to come.

So far, the main conventions I’ve discussed concern artists, albums and tracks, which are exemplified by

• artist:pink floyd
• album:the dark side of the moon (pink floyd)
• track:speak to me (pink floyd)

What about gigs?

My first thoughts are the following:

• Most gigs are primarily defined by an artist (or sometimes artists) and a date.
• Very occasionally an artist may play two gigs in one day; in that case, adding a venue or a time ought to be sufficient to disambigate it
• As usual, these things are easy to know if you attend the gig, have a ticket or a listing, and are pretty unambiguous.

I therefore think there are two prime options for defining gigs. The first would to use only the artist and date, in the main case, and to qualify when necessary with a disambiguating time (this being less ambiguous than place). The second option is to use artist, date and start time in every case. (I suppose time zone considerations could mess up the non-ambiguity of full datestamps, but I don’t care.)

The former has the considerable advantage of simplicity, and I would imagine will be unique well over 99.9% of the time; the latter is more precise and uniform, but has the significant disadvantage that start times are harder to know and less clearly defined.

On balance, therefore, I am tempted to suggest that gigs be exemplified by the following:

gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10)

and, where an artist performs more than once on the same day, and when it is important to distinguish:

gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10:21:00)

(I think sub-minute accuracy will probably not be required in this case.

As an example, Dean Friedman, surely one of the finest songwriters and performers playing today, performed last night, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe, at the Music Box, at Stevenson College. Here is the object for that gig

• gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10)

and my here is the address of my njr/review tag for it:

http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10)/njr/review

It’s value is:

$ fish show -a 'gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10)' review
Object with about="gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10)":
  /njr/review = "http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/gig:dean%20friedman%20%282011-08-10%29/njr/review.html"

That URL, points to the review itself, which is stored in Fluidinfo, in the tag njr/review.html, which can be view at http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/gig:dean friedman (2011-08-10)/njr/review.html

A reasonable alternative to gig be concert, which I suspect will be used in preference for classic music, but the ubiquity of the term gig for non-classical music (and even, colloquially, for classical concerts) suggests that gig is the better starting point.