MusicNet Blog

City Hall, Cardiff

Last month at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010 at City Hall in Cardiff (13-16 September 2010), we gave our first conference paper about the MusicNet project. Thank you to everyone that came to our session and asked questions. It was informative to learn that many other delegates have encountered datasets (across a range of subjects, from geography to chess!) in which synonymous entities are not aligned; precisely the problem which the alignment tool we are building for MusicNet aims to address.

A short abstract of our paper is given below, but please also take a look at the extended abstract and our presentation slides:

• MusicNet AHM 2010 Paper – Extended Abstract (PDF)
• MusicNet AHM 2010 Paper – Presentation Slides (PowerPoint)

Thank you to the organising committee and administrators for making the event run so smoothly.

ABSTRACT: The MusicNet Composer URI Project
Daniel Alexander Smith, David Bretherton, Joe Lambert, and mc schraefel

In any domain, a key activity of researchers is to search for and synthesize data from multiple sources in order to create new knowledge. In many cases this process is laborious, to the point of making certain questions nearly intractable because the cost of the searches outstrips the time available to complete the research. As more resources are published as Linked Data, data from multiple heterogeneous sources should be more rapidly discoverable and automatically integrable, enabling previously intractable queries to be explored, and standard queries to be significantly accelerated for more rapid knowledge discovery. But Linked Data is not of itself a complete solution. One of the key challenges of Linked Data is that its strength is also a weakness: anyone can publish anything. So in classical music, for instance, 17 sources may publish data about ‘Schubert’, but there is no de facto way to know that any of these Schuberts are the same, because the sources are not aligned. Without alignment, much of the benefit of Linked Data is diminished: resources can effectively be stranded rather than discovered, or tangled nets of only guessed at associations in a particular dataset can end up costing more than their value to untangle.

The MusicNet project, which emerged out of Southampton’s musicSpace project, is set to address the challenge just outlined by “minting” URIs for key musicology assets to provide a framework for the effective exploration of Linked Data about classical music. Unique URIs will be minted for each composer that exists in our data partners’ datasets. Basic biographical data will also be exposed, as well as name variants in different sources to allow for compatibility with legacy data. Crucially, this information will be curated by domain experts so that MusicNet will become a reliable source of data about the names of classical music composers. However, the real benefit of this work is that it will align identifiers across data sources, which is a prerequisite for the creation of Linked Data classical music and musicology resources, if such resources are to be optimally useful and usable.

The establishment of authoritative URIs for composers, and moreover the disambiguation of composers in online data sources that will flow from this, is an essential first step in the provision of Linked Data services for classical music and musicology. Our work will provide a model and tools that can usefully be employed elsewhere.