Place: Providing BOTH the room name AND the building name

[fjjulien]

I stumbled upon a case where I was extremely challenged in retrieving the Offer page for a show that I wanted to recommend to a friend. Here's what I recounted to the presenting organization:

"La page "Programmation" de votre site ne fonctionne pas aujourd'hui : il n'y a aucun événement à venir.

C'est dommage, car j'essayais de récupérer le lien vers la page de "Durant des années" afin de recommander ce spectacle à une amie.

J'ai appelé votre billetterie et la personne très gentille et courtoise qui m'a répondu a suggéré que je consulte directement le site de la billetterie Tuxedo. Ça n'a toutefois pas été facile puisque Tuxedo n'affiche pas les événements sur son site principal. Il m'aura fallu plusieurs recherches sur Google pour que j'arrive finalement au mini-site de LNSGD/Tuxedo, qui n'est lui-même pas super bien optimisé pour la découverte. Les mots-clés «La Nouvelle Scène Gilles Desjardins» n'apparaissent ni dans le corps de la page, ni dans les données structurées en arrière-plan (résultat Schema Validator)."

Indeed, the structured data on this page identifies the Place entity with a location.name that corresponds to the specific room ("Studio A") rather than the more commonly known building name ("La Nouvelle Scène Gilles Desjardins").

I suspect this issue is likely to be frequently experienced with event data from ticketing service providers. Their particular use case requires offers to be attached to a specific room, with a specific capacity, rather than to a building. A quick look at the lepointdevente.com reveals other examples of venue names that even local arts goers may not be familiar with, such as salle Fenplast (at Collège Charles-Lemoyne).

I believe this is the kind of issue that Artsdata is apt at solving.

Could run automated inference on Artsdata minted events to retrieve the building name and push it as a value under location.alternativeName, if applicable?

Beyond serving a basic discoverability use case, I believe this feature could be useful to data reusers who might wish to populate both values on their webpage (possibly using different heading or body styles).

See also this other discussion on Event alternateName: #96

[fjjulien]

FYI - I was curious to know if alternateName had any impact whatsoever on SEO. My Google search found several blog posts that recommended the property for businesses. This is consistent with Google's own recommendations for organization structured data:

We recommend focusing on properties that are useful to your users, such as name or alternateName for your business name as well as an indication of real-world presence (for example, address or telephone) and online presence (for example, url or logo).
Source: Google, Organization Structured Data

If the property can improve the SEO of businesses, I guess it would also improve the SEO (and discoverability) of venues.