As a pilot application for Needle, ITA Software has assembled a database of over 60,000 festivals & events, aggregating multiple ticket feeds from sources such as Ticketmaster and Stubhub, as well as web-scraped event listings from hundreds of "long tail" sources such as public community websites, local convention and visitor bureau sites, civic tourism sites, and special-interest sites.  We have also collected a companion database of 75,000 North American tourist attractions from scores of additional websites. You can browse these live databases using the Needle travel widget, embedded below:

This application is challenging due to the combination of hundreds of sources, frequent data updates, and low data quality from many of the sites.  Yet both ITA's events and attractions databases, sourced from over 300 websites, were built and maintained by just two staff members (a full-timer and an intern), both non-programmers.