Event Edition
A specific year-instance of a recurring event — IDS Cologne 2025, Pride Show 2026 — distinct from the abstract event itself.
An Event Edition is a specific year-instance of a recurring event. IDS Cologne 2025 is an edition of the abstract event IDS Cologne. Composites Bridge 2027 is an edition of the abstract event Composites Bridge. Pride Show 2026 and Pride Show 2027 are two editions of Pride Show.
In the Messe Atlas directory the distinction is first-class. The event record holds the abstract — name, organizer, vertical, primary city, primary country. The edition record holds the year-instance — start date, end date, venue, exhibitor count, attendee count, and the source URL the data came from.
Why this distinction is non-negotiable
If you collapse "the event" and "the year-instance" into one row, you destroy every churn signal in the directory. You can't tell whether Henkel exhibited at IDS Cologne 2023 but skipped 2025 unless those are separate rows. The whole point of tracking trade events at scale is the year-over-year comparison: which exhibitors stayed, which dropped, which moved up a sponsor tier, which moved down. That entire layer collapses if there's no Edition.
Most event directories — including some big ones — get this wrong. They list the show with one set of dates and overwrite when the next edition lands. Atlas does not.
What an Edition row contains
- Identity: event reference + edition year (unique per event)
- Dates: start date, end date
- Place: venue, city, country (often different from the abstract event's "primary" venue/city when an edition tours)
- Counts: exhibitor count, attendee count — as published by the organizer, or as derived by Atlas's exhibitor-counting methodology when no organizer count is published
- Source: the URL Atlas scraped this from, and the timestamp of the scrape
The (event, edition_year) uniqueness constraint guarantees one canonical row per year — no accidental duplicates when a scraper rerun finds the same edition twice.
How Atlas sources Edition data
Three paths in priority order:
- Organizer registration page — the most authoritative source for exhibitor lists when the organizer publishes one
- Atlas's own scrapers — for events where the organizer doesn't publish a structured list, Atlas extracts from the public event website + press releases
- Manual editorial pass — for high-priority events where the data needs human verification (counts dispute, conflicting sources, etc.)
See exhibitor-counting for the methodology behind exhibitor count attribution.
Cite this
Atlas Dictionary, "Event Edition", /dictionary/event-edition.