The pub spine

Every event ties to a canonical pub via licence_ref, the IDs we share with pubhub.ie. 6,842 pubs in the spine. The spine is read-only on our side; pubhub owns the canonical data. Our updates flow back to pubhub via the shared community-mentions store.

Two primary tables

  • slots — recurring weekly events. Pub × DayOfWeek × StartTime × Type. One row per slot, runs forever until marked dormant.
  • events — one-off events. Pub × DateTime × Type. Auto-archived after the event date.

Source feeds

  1. Editorial — every event with source: editorial was verified by hand at write time.
  2. Pub Facebook pages — allow-listed pages, scraped daily, structured into slots/events with date/time extraction.
  3. Eventbrite-IE — daily pull, filtered for pub-tier events (under €30 ticket, pub-venue tags).
  4. The Session (thesession.org) — Irish trad-session listings via their public RSS / API. Recurring-slot-friendly.
  5. Local-paper RSS — Irish Examiner, Connacht Tribune, Limerick Leader, Kilkenny People — "what's on" sections pulled and parsed.
  6. Publican direct — once pubhub.ie's claim flow lands, verified publicans publish directly.
  7. Punter submissions — submit form with 48-hour editorial review.

Verification cadence

  • Recurring slots — re-verified every 90 days. Each slot carries a last_verified field; expired without confirmation = marked dormant and hidden from the public view.
  • One-off events — verified at submission AND at publish time. Dead-link auto-hide.
  • Pub data — sourced from pubhub.ie's places-enriched.json; we don't re-verify because pubhub already does.

What we don't do

  • Generate events with AI. Every event traces back to a real source.
  • Treat boards.ie / Reddit threads as primary sources. Community signal is "mentioned at" data only.
  • Aggregate beyond county / type / pub. No global "everything everywhere" feed.

Open questions

The data engine is v1. We'll iterate based on what users actually want — if "live music near me" is the top query, we'll over-invest there; if "trad on a Sunday" is the killer, we'll specialise on it. Phase 1 (4-6 weeks) is when this gets real.