Wendell Hicken wrote:
Two databases I think would be useful to add formal connections to are:
IBDB - Internet Broadway Database (http://www.ibdb.com)
This is roughly an analogue of the Internet Movie Database, only for
Broadway.
Many artists have pages here with information on their Broadway
productions.
No objections here. Scanned the site a bit and they don't seem to have a policy
for linking, the disclaimer does not mention they don't want it or only want it
in a certain form. So this should not be a problem.
What we are missing experience in is how constant the links are.
I analysed their linking schema a bit. The main types are:
* http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=... which is used for persons, organisation
and also some strange border cases it seems:
http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=20287 (which for some reason also has another
ID: http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?id=78714 ).
* http://www.ibdb.com/venue.asp?ID=... for, well, the venues of the plays, that
is theatres mostly. Those then can have sub-locations as text-links on the
page, see for example http://www.ibdb.com/venue.asp?ID=1174
* http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=... for general information about a show -
this then links to several productions.
* http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?id=... - a production of a show with all
the detailed information.
* http://www.ibdb.com/season.asp?ID=... - a list of productions in a season.
They switch between upper case and lower case for the ID parameter which really
makes no difference though. I'd say we use the person.asp for artists and
production.asp for releases.
Classical Composers Database (http://www.classical-composers.org)
This contains a lot of information about classical composers, which
could
help augment the Classical support in MusicBrainz. (I'd personally
like to
see more of the type of info stored there - i.e. French Composers,
Russian
Composers, etc). Note the nice About page here:
"All material presented in this database is freely available to
everybody."
No objections here either apart from missing experience on reliability of the site as
well as link "staticness". Also we should keep in mind that this is a website
mainly maintained by one person. As far as I can see this site can only be used to be
linked from artist pages, it has no pages for releases.
About he linking schema to be used:
Artist names like Arrigo Barnabé link to
http://www.classical-composers.org/comp/barnabe - this then redirects to
http://www.classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?comp=barnabe
If I understand the about-page correctly, the redirect is to be preferred:
"In the cause of 2000 I drastically changed the way this database works. I now use
CGI scripts for almost all pages. This makes retrieving the information even more
flexible. Side effect is that the old composer pages are no longer available. They are
replaced by a redirect page. Someday these pages will also disappear!"
More a general question now:
Do we intend to have link types for all those specialised sites or would it be
preferrable to have a multi-purpose type, like "information page" or whatever?
Simon (Shepard)
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