Google's MusicEvent harvesting

I was interested to read [1] that Google is now harvesting http://schema.org/MusicEvent data out of JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata [2] on artists home pages. Although it’s kind of strange that I can’t seem to find any JSON-LD, RDFa or Microdata in the Chick Corea website [3] example they use. Can you find any?

One particular point in the Troubleshooting tips section of the docs caught my eye:

“”"
Google isn't showing a Knowledge Graph panel for your artist. 
Many factors determine whether a specific search triggers a Knowledge Graph panel, but helpful steps you can take are to make sure that the artist is in both Wikipedia and MusicBrainz, and that the artist’s official home page is recorded properly on both those sites.
“””

Having MusicBrainz and Wikipedia agree about the homepage for a musician seemed like an interesting way of determining the URI for a Musician. I wonder why they didn’t promote the use of the performer [4] property to link the event to the musician…

So instead of:

{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "MusicEvent",
  "name" : "B.B. King",
  "startDate" : "2014-04-12T19:30",
  "location" : { 
     "@type" : "Place",
     "name" : "Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel",
     "address" : "79 Washington St., Providence, RI"
  },
  "offers" : {
     "@type" : "Offer",
     "url" : "https://www.etix.com/ticket/1771656"
  }
}

You could say that B.B. King is the performer using his Wikipedia or MusicBrainz URL:

{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "MusicEvent",
  "name" : "B.B. King",
  "startDate" : "2014-04-12T19:30",
  "location" : { 
     "@type" : "Place",
     "name" : "Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel",
     "address" : "79 Washington St., Providence, RI"
  },
  "offers" : {
     "@type" : "Offer",
     "url" : "https://www.etix.com/ticket/1771656"
  },
  “performer”: {
    “@type”: “Person”,
    “@id”:  "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.B._King”
   }
}

Maybe the potential for misinformation and spam was too great?

//Ed

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/03/musical-artists-your-official-tour.html
[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/4620133
[3] http://chickcorea.com/
[4] http://schema.org/performer

Received on Friday, 14 March 2014 08:38:44 UTC