The internet forgot to structure event data. While this sounds like the punchline to a data joke, the simple fact is no one has fixed finding events. The biggest tech companies of the world have tried/failed to solve this problem so we've made it our job to solve it.
So why does this event data matter?
Question for you - how did you find out about a house before Zillow?
What about a business before Yelp?
Or how about a location before Maps?
All of these are built on structured data at scale.
Everything else on the internet got structured.
Yahoo organized the pages, building a human curated directory when the web was small enough to be catalogued by hand. Google connected the links, treating each hyperlink as a vote and using the structure of the graph itself to rank what mattered. Facebook connected the people, turning relationships that already existed into a queryable social graph. Yelp structured local business listings and Zillow structured MLS listings, each taking a messy physical world category and giving it consistent fields, so that for the first time you could compare, sort and price them.
Events got missed. And it is not because nobody tried. Google said it would solve this with Google Events. Facebook said it had solved it with Facebook Events. Eventbrite said it would solve it, and the list runs on well past those three. The issue was never ambition or awareness. The issue has always been structuring the data.
In 2011 Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on schema.org, a shared vocabulary that lets a machine read a web page, and event markup was in the specification on day one. In 2017 Google added an events experience that pulled structured events directly into search results. Fifteen years after schema.org, almost no site publishes events in a form another machine can reliably read. Again, the problem wasn't solved.
Can't you already Google "things to do near me"?
Yes you can, but it doesn't have all the data. That's the problem.
That question assumes the data is out there, organized and ready to lift. It isn't.
Events live on pages that expose their structure and pages that do not, in feeds, in embedded widgets, in third party tools, in social posts, and in plenty of places that are not really pages at all. Work from only the slice that happens to be easy and you get the ticketed events everybody already has. If this were just lifting what sits on a clean page, somebody would have finished it a decade ago.
That question assumes the data is out there, organized and ready to lift. It isn't.
Events live on pages that expose their structure and pages that do not, in feeds, in embedded widgets, in third party tools, in social posts, and in plenty of places that are not really pages at all. Work from only the slice that happens to be easy and you get the ticketed events everybody already has. If this were just lifting what sits on a clean page, somebody would have finished it a decade ago.
So how did you do it?
We did two things: we map, and we graph, both the calendars and the events.
The map is how we find them. We map the same event as many as ten different ways, so the connection holds and the record refreshes on its own instead of going stale.
The graph is the part we built. The same venue and the same event, resolved across sources that each describe them differently, connected into one living structure that traces back to whoever published it. Anyone can build a graph. We are the ones graphing the open calendar, and keeping it current.
Also, It is hard. That is the point, and it is worth it. It turns out you can solve problem this way, so that keeps us going.
Why this matters now.
Events drive community, community drives local business, and local business puts on more events. That flywheel is real and it is turning at a fraction of its potential speed, because most of it is invisible to the people standing next to it.
Meanwhile the open web is closing. AI increasingly answers the question rather than sending you to the source. If the open calendar is not connected in a form that points back to whoever published it, it gets absorbed into answers that credit nobody, or enclosed in a walled garden charging rent on a community's own information. There is a window here and it will not stay open.
Why a Project?
This is our mission AND we want to actually solve this problem. We cannot do it alone. We have assembled the most complete structured record of events that exists, and we still miss things.
If you run a venue, a gallery, a shop, a studio or anything that gathers people, we want your events in our graph if they have not yet been found.
Creators? The cal in bio you get free when you connect your events to the graph is pretty sweet.
Start here to connect to the graph: https://www.meetdaisy.co/users/sign_up
If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to [email protected].
Every event deserves to be found.