Get category for a facebook event

Question

Since there is no category attribute for the Facebook Graph Api Event endpoint, I have problems finding the category for a Facebook event. I hope there is some clever way to do this that I have missed.

First some examples. Let's say a user creates an event on Facebook for "Tom's Birthday Party". This would probably fall under the "Party" category. Whereas "Judy's Paintings - Opening at FussFuss Gallery" would fall under the "Art" category.

The only ways I can find to do this are:

1. Pairing the event with its venue (which is a Facebook Page endpoint) and use the category for the venue, but very often this category does not fit the event very well.
2. Another way would be textual analysis of event description. For example, if the event description is "A night of live heavy metal music in Jerry's Basement. BYOB" then we could do something as simple as detect the "music" keyword, all the way to NLP to try to determine meaning.
3. Some combination of the above with weighting.

All of the above will sometimes produce wrong categories.

Does anyone have any better ideas on how to determine the category for an event? Any ideas are appreciated!

Answer 1

The category field is now available as of graph api v2.4. The only problem it seems (from my testing anyway) is that not many people use this field when creating events. Out of the 434 events currently being returned for my call (from the 95 id’s used), only 2 provide a category. This may only be relevant to the type of events i’m calling, but thought it would be useful to note :)