Opening the Stage Door for Big Data in Broadway: Building an Easily Accessible API

As Yaakov Bressler states in his wonderful Meduim Article, broadway data housing sites like The Broadway League, IBDB, Playbill, PlaybillPro, Broadway World, and Theatrical Index have compiled an enormous amount of data. However, accessing that data isn't so simple. The goal of this project is to use various sources to compile Broadway data, and provide a convenient API.

The Game Plan

1) Model the Database

• We need to decide on how to structure the data.

2) Build the API

• Next we will need to decide how to expose the data. Either using something like REST or GraphQL.

2.5) Build Scrapers

• We already have some data, but in order to provide the best data possible, we'll need to buid out our own web scrapers.

3) Decide on a Cloud Provider

• Once we've got the proof of concept down, the database is populated, and the API is thoroughly tested we will decide on a provider to host our database and API.

4) Add More Features

• Once we're up and running we want to continue to expand the data that we're providing!