A musicbrainz-inspired database for performing arts (theatre, dance, etc.)

StageBrainz aims to be an open, free, online, crowdsourced overview of the performing arts.

As in Musicbrainz, StageBrainz has a limited number of core entities:

• Organities: persons, organisations, venues, etc. active in performing arts
• Productions: a stage production that will be performed repeatedly over the course of a season
• Shows: the actual performances of a stage production
• Works: conceptual creations, e.g. a theater text, from which stage productions can be derived
• Characters: fictional characters in works, e.g. Hamlet

And a number of auxiliary entities

• Genres: all sorts of genres for performing arts, e.g. dance, theater, theater for a young audience, ...
• Languages: ISO list of languages
• Locations: free street address text fields, with fixed city and country level
• Urls: links to online resources

Every core entity has a disambiguation line. Because of this, entities with duplicate names can have a disambiguation string in representation, e.g. 'Ancienne Belgique (Concert hall in Brussels)'.

Each entity, so both the core as well as the auxiliary entities, has a related X_type, e.g. a person (member of people) can be of type 'Actor' (a person_type).

INSERT UML TO SHOW TYPE RELATION

The core entities can also have an Alias of a certain AliasType. As an example, the Venue 'Ancienne Belgique' is 'abbreviated as' (i.e. the AliasType) 'AB'.

INSERT UML TO SHOW ALIAS + ALIASTYPE RELATION

Furthermore, each entity can be related to all other entities, including itself. It is therefore possible to make every kind of relation:

Every relation in itself has a Type.

INSERT UML TO SHOW RELATION + RELATIONTYPE

Because of this, it is possible to distinguish between a (semantic) value of a relation, and the way in which the relation is presented. As an example, an Actor who performs a role in a stage production can be credited as 'with'; in this model, it is possible to represent the relation between the Actor and the Production with a RelationActorProduction of the Type 'Actor', while the Relation carries the name 'with'.