Here’s a great example of how the MusicNet data can be used to enhance existing sites. The ‘Composed’ bookmarklet decorates an existing COPAC composer record with all the extra information that MusicNet contains about that person.

Head on over to this blog post for more details. Incidentally this was created as an entry to the UK Discovery competition we blogged about earlier in the year.

So, who’s going to turn this into a GreaseMonkey script so that the bookmarklet isn’t need?

The MusicNet dataset has been included as part of the UK Discovery global developer competition. The rules of the competition are simple, build an app/tool that makes use of at least one of the 10 featured datasets.

UK Discovery is working with libraries, archives and museums to open up data about their resources for free re-use and aggregation. DevCSIis working with developers in the education sector, many of who will have innovative ideas about how to exploit this open data in new applications.

This Developer Competition runs throughout July 2011. It starts on Monday 4 July – Independence Day, a good day for liberating data – and closes on Monday 1 August. It’s open to anyone anywhere in the world.

For more information about the competition see http://discovery.ac.uk/developers/competition/. Prizes are available for the best entrants, competition ends Monday 1 August 2011.

We have two primary prototypal outputs/products from the project, they are:

1. The Alignment Tool
2. The MusicNet Codex

We’ll discuss each of these in turn and address what they are, who they are for and how you can use them in your own projects.

The Alignment Tool

The Alignment Tool is the unexpected victory of the project. Whilst the primary goal from the outset was to produce some meaningful RDF (discussed more later), the tooling we created to enable this has become a powerful re-usable asset.

What is it?

The Alignment Tool is a WebApp designed to enable domain experts to cleanse and align one or more datasets.

Who is it for?

We built the tool with non-technical domain experts in mind, assuming only that the end user have experience of modern OS paradigms such as drag & drop (users or desktop OS’s such as OS X & Windows will be familiar with WIMP) GUI’s).

The tool is designed for users with expert knowledge in the domain of the data they are aligning, in our use case a Musicology Research Fellow.

We also enabled full keyboard control via shortcuts to enable quicker data manipulation for users that had a higher technical proficiency.

NB: The setup/installation of the prototype tool currently requires basic LAMP knowledge

Why would you use it?

This tool is designed to help users clean-up their dirty data. It is specifically aimed at disambiguating names/authors or grouping several different instances of an author together.

For example, it could be used to find all occurrences of a single author in an EPrints repository (e.g. “Joe Lambert”, “J. Lambert”, “Lambert, J”) and reduce these into a single canonical reference.

The tool handles two types of operations really well, we call this internal and external alignment.

• Internal alignment is looking for duplications or spelling errors within a single dataset. E.g. the EPrints example above.
• External alignment is looking for matches across multiple different datasets, such as between Grove & British Library (as was the case with MusicNet).

The Alignment Tool not only handles both of these operations but it can handle them simultaneously, saving the user the time and effort of multiple iterations of data cleansing.

How to use it?

The Alignment Tool loads in a web browser (currently Firefox/Safari/Chrome) & is built using a single screen split-pane UI.

Ungrouped/Grouped Lists

The left hand side contains two lists, one for all items that have yet to have been “grouped” and the second which shows all Grouped items. Each list has an A-Z control for quick indexing into the data and can be fully controlled by the keyboard. By selecting multiple items from the ungrouped list the user (at the touch of a single keystroke) can create a group from the selection.

Verified Toggle

The verified toggle lets the user see either expert-verified or non-expert-verified groups. During the setup stages the Alignment Tool will try and automatically align as many entities as it can, to ensure no incorrect alignments make it into the final dataset we mark these automatic assignments as “unverified”.

This process lightens the load for the end user without reducing the quality of the tool’s output.

Context/Extra Metadata

The right hand side is where the user can see extended metadata about one or more items. This view displays all relevant information that we know about each entity and can be used by the expert to decide if more than one instance are in fact the same.

Metadata Match

Metadata Match is an additional visual prompt to help the expert decide whether entities are the same. If multiple entities are selected and their metadata matches they will be highlighted in grey. If the user hovers over the metadata, all matching items are highlighted.

Demo

Our prototype for the Alignment Tool uses licensed data for its input so we are unable to expose this publicly, our Musicology Research Fellow produced this screencast to demonstrate the tool in use (video best viewed full screen):

The MusicNet Codex

MusicNet was a project funded by the jiscEXPO programme of work, whose primary goal was to expose linked data. We exposed canonical composer URIs as RDF and The MusicNet Codex is the human face on the data and exemplar for the power of Linked Data.

What is it?

The MusicNet Codex is a human-friendly web search interface (like Google) built on top of our rich Composer RDF.

Who is it for?

The MusicNet Codex is for musicologists looking to study classical composers. It is a single repository of information & links to trusted scholarly repositories and is designed to be used by non-technical users. The primary aim for the Codex was to be as simple to use as a Google search.

It could however be generalised for use with other domains as it is a companion product to our Alignment Tool.

Why would you use it?

The Codex offers some benefits over a simple Google search, namely it is domain specific so the user knows that the results will be pertinent to their search (e.g. Beethoven the composer vs Beethoven the movie). It is also a single point of search, encapsulating data from all the major Musicology resources. The typical use case undertaken by musicologists involves searching each of these remote resources individually, the Codex removes this overhead & streamlines the researchers’ workflow.

Using the power of Linked Data we are also able to expose non-scholarly resources about a composer from the same search interface. This means that as well as academic information from databases such as Grove & The British Library a user can immediately get articles from the New York Times, usage in films from IMDB or plays on the BBC.

How to use it/Demo?

The Codex is publicly accessible from http://musicnet.mspace.fm/search. To locate a composer a user can either filter alphabetically or search by keyword.

The results of a search are displayed like this:

Each search result displays the following information:

• The part of the Composers title that matched the search request
• Basic metadata about birth/death dates (where available)
• The datasets that the composer appears in

By selecting a search result, all available links are presented to the user:

Along with all non-scholarly links that the Codex has harvested:

All information displayed in human readable form is also available as RDF, to access this there is a link at the bottom of each page.

Blog Table Of Contents

Over the lifetime of the project, we have published a lot of great content to help inform others of our progress & to try and engage the community in discussion related to issues we feel are important for UKHE/Linked Data.

Below you will find categorised links to our posts and a brief summary of the key themes that emerged:

Guidance on Linked Data publishing

• MusicNet URI scheme and Linked Data hosting
• data.ac.uk. revisited
• data.ac.uk proposal
• Data URI’s & Permanence

The projects primary Linked Data contribution was RDF about musical composers as sourced from a number of scholarly repositories. As such we discussed the need for suitable in-perpetuity hosting of UKHE URIs. This led to a discussion within the community about a centralised data.ac.uk hub where URIs could be minted and used without fear of them disappearing after a project has ended.

Especially when considering short lived rapid innovation projects that deal with Linked Data, the assets produced should outlive the life of the project. Enabling this would bring greater return/value on the funding invested in these projects & would also increase the scope of work achievable by such projects, removing the overhead of long term infrastructure commitments.

Alignment Tool & MusicNet Codex

• 03/11 Progress Update
• 11/10 Progress Update
• Performance & Usability Improvements
• Alignment Tool Implementation
• Alignment Tool Beta 1
• Assisted Manual Data Alignment

The posts above outline the progress & justifications for how we arrived at the Alignment Tool. Our aims for the tool were that it be re-usable and generic without compromising its power/usefulness. If you have data that needs to be cleaned up or you wish to align similar entities within two datasets then the Alignment Tool is a lightweight way to achieve this. The tool is open source and can be downloaded from Google Code.

The later posts also outline our implementation for the MusicNet Codex, which represents a lightweight method to serve up both HTML & RDF data making use of Content Negotiation.

Dissemination & Engagement with the Community

• Tweets from MLDW
• Slides from MLDW
• MLDW Abstracts & Programme
• AES 2011 Workshop
• SDH 2010 Conference
• MusicNet & LinkedBrainz meetup
• AHM 2010 Conference

Throughout the project our work was disseminated at a number of workshops and conferences, you can find slides and abstracts from all our appearances in the links above.

We also organised the Music Linked Data Workshop (MLDW) for the music and linked data community at the end of the project. You can find slides from all those that spoke at this event along with an archive of the tweets captured at the event.

Project Proposal

• Aims, Objectives & Final Outputs
• Wider Benefits to Sector & Achievements for Host Institution
• Risk Analysis & Success Plan
• IRP (Creative Commons Use & Open Source Software License)
• Project Team relationships & End User engagement
• Project Timeline
• Budget

These posts are a breakdown of the original proposal we submitted for the funding call.

Miscellaneous

• Governance Model
• WP1: Data Triage

JISC DaoP

Below is information related to the project as a whole, rather than just our primary output contributions. This includes: the project team, where we are based and the licence under which the project outputs are made available.

Project tag: #musicnet

Project Lifetime: 31 July 2010 – 31 July 2011

Total Funding: £98,068

JISC PIMS: https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1868

This project was funded by JISC under the jiscEXPO stream of the INF11 programme.

Overview

In this project, we propose five deliverables to ensure the longevity and usability of linkable musicological data:

1. authoritative or “minted” URIs for composers that can confidently be used to align/link related sources, and links to those composers in scholarly data sources;

2. persistence of this URI resource;

3. a suite of tools to enable new sources to be easily aligned with these URIs;

4. a Codex to host pointers to any other linked data sources using our URIs;

5. exemplary visualisation/exploration interactions to show how the data can be used for knowledge building.

Primary Product Outputs

Codex, Exposed Linked Data, URI Scheme, Workshop, Documentation & Videos.

Lead Institution

University of Southampton
Electronics & Computer Science
SO17 1BJ
(0)23 8059 5415

Project Team

Joe Lambert

Project Manager / Lead Developer

• jl2 [at] ecs.soton.ac.uk
• twitter: @joelambert
• http://joelambert.co.uk

Daniel Alexander Smith

Linked Data Developer

• ds [at] ecs.soton.ac.uk
• twitter: @das05r
• http://danielsmith.eu

David Bretherton

Musicology Research Fellow

• d.bretherton [at] soton.ac.uk
• twitter: @DavidBretherton

mc schraefel

Principle Investigator

• mc+jisc [at] ecs.soton.ac.uk
• twitter: @mcphoo
• http://nopain2.org/

Software Output

The Alignment Tool can be obtained from the project’s Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/musicnet/. API documentation generated by PDoc can be found at musicnet.mspace.fm/docs.

It has been released under the terms of the MIT Licence.

The MusicNet Codex is built upon the Kohana 3 framework which is licensed on the BSD Licence. All additional custom Codex code is licensed under MIT.

Data

The RDF Data output from the project is available via the MusicNet Codex & is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license.

Documentation

Documentation for installing and using the Alignment Tool can be found as part of the Beta Download or viewable on the web at: Google Code README.

Documentation & blog posts are covered by the Creative Commons Attribution UK 2.0: England and Wales.

Here are the archived tweets from the Music Linked Data Workshop we held at JISC London earlier this month. Slides from the event can be found here.

joelambert

#mldw thanks to all those that came today, especially to those who presented! Also big thanks to @DavidBretherton for organising

Thu, 12 May 2011 19:05:05 +0000

mmmmmrob

Great day at #mldw listening to some very interesting and inspiring ideas.

Thu, 12 May 2011 15:57:25 +0000

mmmmmrob

Seeing as FRBR got mentioned… http://t.co/cB2DqCt #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 15:02:07 +0000

BarryNorton

"Radio 3 spend a lot of time conflict checking to meet a commitment not to play the same piece of music [/ work] twice in a month" #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:58:22 +0000

jonathangrimes

RT @ag_tn21: #MLDW Linked data could help draw together scores and recordings of e.g. Bach 48 prelude 1, derivatives: Gounod Ave Maria, hip-hop version

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:53:59 +0000

BarryNorton

RT @ag_tn21: #MLDW Linked data could help draw together scores and recordings of e.g. Bach 48 prelude 1, derivatives: Gounod Ave Maria, hip-hop version

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:53:25 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Linked data could help draw together scores and recordings of e.g. Bach 48 prelude 1, derivatives: Gounod Ave Maria, hip-hop version

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:51:16 +0000

mmmmmrob

RT @BarryNorton: Just learned about the controversial chord in Chopin’s Ballade No 1 http://bit.ly/cPInlp – interesting #mldw discussions!

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:44:22 +0000

mmmmmrob

Discussion reminds of music is a service: http://t.co/4Yl4v3B #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:39:34 +0000

BarryNorton

@ag_tn21 I see the point but naively it encourages, e.g., interpreting URIs as names, rather than including rdfs:label & rdfs:comment #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:38:41 +0000

mmmmmrob

Musicology asked "what can we do now that we couldn’t do before?" #mldw great question

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:36:20 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Quality test of RDF – open in a browser (Firefox mentioned). Lots of blue links good. Lots of plain text not good

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:36:17 +0000

BarryNorton

Just learned about the controversial chord in Chopin’s Ballade No 1 http://bit.ly/cPInlp – interesting #mldw discussions!

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:30:05 +0000

BarryNorton

@joelambert How important are backlinks to you? Semantically, of course, they’re redundant, but people do work with dumps not crawls #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:23:10 +0000

BarryNorton

@ostephens My understanding is that MusicNet is inclusive of MusicBrainz ID, therefore all it takes is to follow the URI scheme, no? #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:18:07 +0000

joelambert

@ostephens that is the plan, see notes from our meeting, early in the project http://t.co/ZmQiysm #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:17:56 +0000

ostephens

#mldw any work been done in integrating music linked data representation back into library cataloguing practice?

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:07:19 +0000

ostephens

#mldw are MusicNet & LinkedBrainz interlinked, or plans to do this?

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:06:43 +0000

wiilassie

RT @mmmmmrob: #mldw is on the big screen so now’s the time to ask questions

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:05:20 +0000

mmmmmrob

#mldw is on the big screen so now’s the time to ask questions

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:58:00 +0000

nvmb

Gaan we doen. Bedankt voor de tip! RT @lukask: @jtdeboer @fhuysmans Jullie moeten daar bij #nvmb ook eens hashtag #mldw volgen

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:54:46 +0000

gdelatorre

RT @nopiedra: RT @adrianstevenson: Music and #LinkedData at Musicnet workshop in London now http://bit.ly/mwlFKF Should be an interesting one #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:38:02 +0000

ppetej

Great presentation on describing music & problems arising from mismatches in discourse #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:34:14 +0000

chrisleeclark

New perspectives from Charles Inskip for representing music thru metadata. Info and meanings beyond who what when #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:31:58 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Doing work with One Little Indian. They want to make their music available for films but their traditional metadata not useful

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:29:39 +0000

mmmmmrob

Very interesting conceptual models for discussing music from Charlie Inskip #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:28:30 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Charlie Inskip. Creating a user-centred catalogue of music for films. Different standpoints of rights holders and users

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:24:15 +0000

adrianstevenson

Musonto Semantic Musical Search Engine being talked about at #mldw http://bit.ly/kFbzKQ

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:15:59 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Perl used to extract RDF triplets from DBpedia dump. Focus on popular music. High dependence on DBpedia

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:11:54 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Data from DBpedia potentially linked with MySpace|Freebase|Flickr|… Full text search and faceted search.

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:09:46 +0000

mmmmmrob

“@njh: @fantasticlife You should be here too! #mldw” << too true

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:08:15 +0000

jonathangrimes

Interesting tool for early music research – http://t.co/8ZqNHCj. #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:08:15 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Musonto – Jean-Philippe Fauconnier (Louvain). Semantic web search engine for music and musicians. Basic ontology: artist, band, genre

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:06:42 +0000

njh

@fantasticlife You should be here too! #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:06:23 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Early July for pilot data display, late July for completed data. Blog starting shortly

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:03:01 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Enhanced data will be added to BL catalogue and to RISM. Names will be NACO authorized. DEvelopment of OCR for early music notation

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:01:08 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW About 21.000 images under open educational licence. RHUL is partner. Resource discovery enhancement – these are all anthologies.

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:57:56 +0000

nopiedra

RT @adrianstevenson: Music and #LinkedData at Musicnet workshop in London now http://bit.ly/mwlFKF Should be an interesting one #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:56:54 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Sandra Tuppen (BL): Early music online www.earlymusiconline.org Five month project to digitize 300 early music books

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:56:42 +0000

mmmmmrob

http://t.co/1zjQJMz Early Music Online from BL #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:56:26 +0000

mmmmmrob

@dfflanders giving the inside skinny on #jisc bids at #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:52:09 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Session on JISC funding. Community-based evaluation process.

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:51:21 +0000

mmmmmrob

Finally got to meet @njh f2f at #mldw. Albeit briefly as he’s very popular here.

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:04:36 +0000

wilm

“@ppetej: The book referred to was "Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space" http://t.co/iXFff40 #mldw” Interesting, ta!

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:38:57 +0000

jtdeboer

thanks RT @lukask: @jtdeboer @fhuysmans Jullie moeten daar bij #nvmb ook eens hashtag #mldw volgen

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:34:06 +0000

acka47

RT @adrianstevenson: Linked brainz exposing musicbrainz database as Linked Data http://bit.ly/k6X7Jd #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:31:58 +0000

lukask

@jtdeboer @fhuysmans Jullie moeten daar bij #nvmb ook eens hashtag #mldw volgen

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:31:00 +0000

chrisleeclark

Any tie-up with www.musicmetric.com? #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:29:52 +0000

livej

RT @ag_tn21: #MLDW http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/developers Our website is the API: Persistence, Linked open data, RESTful, One web

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:25:56 +0000

jonathangrimes

RT @ag_tn21: #MLDW http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/developers Our website is the API: Persistence, Linked open data, RESTful, One web

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:23:43 +0000

joelambert

RT @adrianstevenson: BBC are automating news article gathering using #linkeddata links. Much more accuarate than keywords #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:22:15 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/developers Our website is the API: Persistence, Linked open data, RESTful, One web

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:21:47 +0000

joelambert

RT @adrianstevenson: BBC Music using the web as their Content Mgt System. BBC staff edit Musicbrainz and wikipedia, so everyone benefits #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:21:38 +0000

jonathangrimes

RT @adrianstevenson: BBC are automating news article gathering using #linkeddata links. Much more accuarate than keywords #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:17:27 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW News articles and complete Desert Island Discs linked to artits page by MusicBrainz identifier.

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:16:44 +0000

adrianstevenson

BBC are automating news article gathering using #linkeddata links. Much more accuarate than keywords #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:16:33 +0000

mmmmmrob

@njh lack of semantics can mean that impressions of Cheryl Cole end up on her artist page – lol #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:14:19 +0000

heloukee

RT @adrianstevenson: BBC Music using the web as their Content Mgt System. BBC staff edit Musicbrainz and wikipedia, so everyone benefits #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:13:41 +0000

adrianstevenson

Hi @Hanpeel You could add some info to wikipedia to populate the BBC Music page http://bbc.in/lTEx0h #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:12:47 +0000

BarryNorton

RT @adrianstevenson: BBC Music using the web as their Content Mgt System. BBC staff edit Musicbrainz and wikipedia, so everyone benefits #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:12:45 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Usrs are encouraged to contribute if data not available. Commissioned album reviews (over 700,000) linked to MusicBrainz.

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:11:32 +0000

thegreatgonzo

RT @adrianstevenson: BBC Music using the web as their Content Mgt System. BBC staff edit Musicbrainz and wikipedia, so everyone benefits #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:11:26 +0000

adrianstevenson

BBC encourage users to contribute if there’s no info on an artist #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:10:33 +0000

jonathangrimes

BBC music doesn’t have a separate CMS – they contribute to MusicBrainz and Wikipedia and "everyone’s a winner", says Humprey. #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:10:05 +0000

adrianstevenson

BBC Music using the web as their Content Mgt System. BBC staff edit Musicbrainz and wikipedia, so everyone benefits #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:09:22 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW All Wikipedia edits are followed using Wikipedia IRC feed. Always up-to-date so defamatory edits aren’t there for long.

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:08:57 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Built upon MusicBrainz and Wikipedia using their identifiers. All edits are peer reviewed. Active user community.

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:08:08 +0000

mmmmmrob

@njh speaking about BBC Music at #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:07:04 +0000

adrianstevenson

Humfrey: BBC Music employs Web scale identifiers based on Musicbrainz with content from wikipedia #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:06:35 +0000

jonathangrimes

Listening to Nicholas Humfrey from BBC Music on using web as CMS. Using MusicBrainz to power their music site. #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:06:16 +0000

martincouzins

RT @paulbradshaw: RT @mmmmmrob: Tom Heath and Chris Bizer’s book on #linkeddata http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/ #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:05:34 +0000

DavidBretherton

@markpower exactly! #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:04:18 +0000

DavidBretherton

#mldw has every signed the thank you card?

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:02:56 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW BBC Music – Using the web as our CMS (Nicholas Humfrey,Technical Architect for BBC Radio and Music Online).

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:02:34 +0000

MarkPower

I keep seeing the hashtag, #mldw, and thinking, "mildew"?

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:01:58 +0000

paulbradshaw

RT @mmmmmrob: Tom Heath and Chris Bizer’s book on #linkeddata http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/ #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:01:57 +0000

mmmmmrob

Tom Heath and Chris Bizer’s book on #linkeddata http://t.co/kRzdW2J #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:01:43 +0000

ppetej

The book referred to was "Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space" http://tinyurl.com/3k6wlbt #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:01:31 +0000

adrianstevenson

Sorry most of my last tweets should say Barry (Norton), not Simon (Dixon) I think #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:58:53 +0000

fantasticlife

confused that i’ve just been chatting to @moustaki when he should be at #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:57:35 +0000

adrianstevenson

Simon hoping browser extensions will utilise the Musicbrainz RDfa to allow user to do useful things like link to Spotify #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:56:11 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Monday is RDFa roll-out. Might need new browser extensions to the RDF embedded in an HTML page.

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:56:01 +0000

songschris

RT @adrianstevenson: Linked brainz exposing musicbrainz database as Linked Data http://bit.ly/k6X7Jd #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:55:23 +0000

ppetej

New musicbrainz pages will use RDFa. Brilliant stuff #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:55:05 +0000

wiilassie

Seeing RDFa for first time. As someone with long HTML background it makes much more sense to me than RDF. #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:54:55 +0000

adrianstevenson

Musicbrainz will be rolling out RDFa in its pages as of Monday16th May . Simon showing us the RDFa now at #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:54:40 +0000

ppetej

Nice whirlwind tour of mapping RDBMS to RDF using D2R #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:52:40 +0000

adrianstevenson

Linkedbrainz using Music Ontology http://bit.ly/iDCBhC as the basis of the encoding and D2R Server to serve RDFhttp://bit.ly/lGWYsp #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:51:35 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW New release on Monday has further artist attributes, artist groups and release groups.

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:49:02 +0000

adrianstevenson

… at least I think that’s what Simon was explaining #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:48:35 +0000

adrianstevenson

@ostephens Not sure in truth #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:47:28 +0000

adrianstevenson

Simon explaining notion of distinguishing between Representations and Descriptions. Linkedbrainz using # URIs http://bit.ly/jYsfjx #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:47:18 +0000

moustaki

RT @adrianstevenson: Linked brainz exposing musicbrainz database as Linked Data http://bit.ly/k6X7Jd #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:45:32 +0000

mmmmmrob

Once again the ir/nir distinction causes issues explaining #linkeddata at #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:44:50 +0000

interfaceconf

RT @markplumbley: Barry Norton: The nice thing about canonical URIs is that there are so many to choose from #MLDW

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:43:11 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Disambiguation easier when the entity is specified. Human-readable & machine-readable URIs. Persons etc. non-informational resources

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:42:55 +0000

ostephens

@adrianstevenson so does LinkedBrainz link to MusicNet Codex? #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:41:14 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Aims to be ultimate source. Principles: Use URIs as names for things. Use http URIs so people can look them up. At present uses UUIDs

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:40:16 +0000

markplumbley

Barry Norton: The nice thing about canonical URIs is that there are so many to choose from #MLDW

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:40:15 +0000

adrianstevenson

Linkedbrainz aims to be a canonical source of identifiers for music resources – ultimate source of music information. #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:39:37 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW LinkedBrainz Live (Simon Dixon, Cedric Mesnage, Barry Norton – QMUL). Live on Monday coming. MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:38:02 +0000

adrianstevenson

Linked brainz exposing musicbrainz database as Linked Data http://bit.ly/k6X7Jd #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:37:43 +0000

ostephens

CORE project http://is.gd/NsY7lH using Similarity Ontology originally developed for Music to express similarities btwn academic papers #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:35:10 +0000

mmmmmrob

Interesting thoughts on overlaying and intermixing different narratives to music using #linkeddata #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:33:51 +0000

adrianstevenson

De-Roure et al paper describes web-centric methodology ‘An e-Research Approach to Web-scale Music Analysis’ #mldw http://bit.ly/lE3KoJ (pdf)

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:31:43 +0000

jpfauconnier

RT @jrcetic: Participating to #MLDW with @jpfauconnier – SALAMI presentation right now – http://salami.music.mcgill.ca/

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:30:41 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW More info at http://salami.music.mcgill.ca/

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:30:31 +0000

mmmmmrob

http://t.co/hGNhQlo #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:29:03 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Two trained humans only managed 72% overlap which is a good measure for comparing against algorithms. Some disagreement that low

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:26:05 +0000

mmmmmrob

Interesting analysis of algorithms for music processing at #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:24:11 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Mirex overview. Began 2005 … collected/donated community resource for testing algorithms. Avoids usual rights problems.

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:20:17 +0000

adrianstevenson

SALAMI project using mirex s/w & sonic analsyer 4 Web-scale analysis of musical structure http://bit.ly/ln59Wa http://bit.ly/kM6Bmy #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:19:22 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Analysis at small, medium or large scale. Segment Ontology created (Kevin Page & Ben Fields).

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:17:58 +0000

jonathangrimes

Here for music linked data workshop #mldw (@ JISC) http://4sq.com/kHi31e

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:16:34 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW 23,000 hours of recorded music from Internet Archive with student-sourced annotations. Linked data output. SonicVisualiser used.

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:15:27 +0000

jrcetic

Participating to #MLDW with @jpfauconnier – SALAMI presentation right now – http://salami.music.mcgill.ca/

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:13:47 +0000

adrianstevenson

RT @ppetej: Interesting comment on tension between quest for "canonical URI" and potential sustainability advantages of multiple URIs #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:13:05 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Towards Web-Scale Analysis of Music Structures (SALAMI). Computational approach to structural analysis of large scale data

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:10:30 +0000

wiilassie

I can’t keep up with tweeting and note-taking – do follow #mldw for great summaries.

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:10:14 +0000

ppetej

Interesting comment on tension between quest for "canonical URI" and potential sustainability advantages of multiple URIs #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:06:11 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Keeps provenance data for source of name data. Harvested links from BBC to IMDB, DBpedia et al.

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:59:30 +0000

ppetej

Would be interesting to compare the way MusicNet expose their names/name clusters with the way VIAF do #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:56:29 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW MusicNet publishes links between multiple name URIs. MusicnetCodex displays all matching names for e.g. Bach Johann

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:55:39 +0000

adrianstevenson

MusicNet Codex being demoed at #mldw http://bit.ly/jfhj23

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:55:37 +0000

joelambert

#mldw MusicNet codex can be found and searched at http://t.co/2WDz0cU

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:55:31 +0000

BarryNorton

@chrisleeclark Uniqueness is impossible in the Web of Data – what matters is high quality, provenanced sameAs links #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:54:28 +0000

kevingashley

Wishing 3 events today would get together so could be at all of them "Global music linked data infrastructures in the cloud". #esym11 #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:53:55 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW URIs for names once verified. Links between composers in multiple scholarly repositories. Disparate data dumps all converted to RDF

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:53:05 +0000

chrisleeclark

3 URI for Beethoven. Which is unique? #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:52:17 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Prototype 2 needed human-friendly interface with keyboard shortcuts. Auto-suggested groups can be verified and added to

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:50:46 +0000

GoogleAPIGurus

#MLDW Alignment API and Google Docs to compare names but found false matches with high similarity measures.

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:50:21 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW Alignment API and Google Docs to compare names but found false matches with high similarity measures.

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:48:09 +0000

adrianstevenson

Musicnet project used Google API for name alignment tool #mldw but limited success

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:47:07 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW musicSpace begat MusicNet. Faceted browser that had realignable metadata fields but no realignable ‘dirty’ data

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:45:51 +0000

ostephens

Wish I was at #mldw – anyone there interested in how LD for music could be exploited by libraries?

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:40:29 +0000

wiilassie

Me too but Twitterfall is on display between speakers so I have stage fright RT @ag_tn21: #MLDW At Music Linked Data Workshop in London

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:40:03 +0000

BarryNorton

at the Music Linked Data Workshop #mldw at JISC today, presenting LinkedBrainz http://bit.ly/99CoS5

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:39:31 +0000

ppetej

Scanning the room trying to match Twitter avatars to bodies at #mldw Should be a doddle to do mine

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:38:39 +0000

adrianstevenson

Music and #LinkedData at Musicnet workshop in London now http://bit.ly/mwlFKF Should be an interesting one #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:34:18 +0000

ag_tn21

#MLDW At Music Linked Data Workshop in London

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:33:14 +0000

njh

Just arrived at #MLDW to talk about the BBC Music website.

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:28:56 +0000

chrisleeclark

Seeking new meanings in music metadata #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:13:27 +0000

wiilassie

On my way to Music Linked Data Workshop. Might tweet it or might focus on offline notes for work report/blog post. #MLDW

Thu, 12 May 2011 08:58:34 +0000

SandraTuppen

Off to linked data workshop where will be talking about JISC-funded #earlymusiconline project, http://www.earlymusiconline.org #MLDW

Thu, 12 May 2011 08:41:29 +0000

markplumbley

Music Linked Data Today http://bit.ly/jQuDOX then Music & Sem Web Fri @ AES London 2011 http://bit.ly/hv21IJ #MLDW // via @dder

Thu, 12 May 2011 07:35:08 +0000

joelambert

En route to #mldw London

Thu, 12 May 2011 07:10:23 +0000

ppetej

Heading to that London for #mldw

Thu, 12 May 2011 06:41:22 +0000

alsothings

RT @dder: Semantic music to my ears! Music Linked Data Thu http://bit.ly/jQuDOX then Music & Sem Web Fri @ AES London 2011 http://bit.ly/hv21IJ #MLDW

Wed, 11 May 2011 22:10:15 +0000

dder

Semantic music to my ears! Music Linked Data Thu http://bit.ly/jQuDOX then Music & Sem Web Fri @ AES London 2011 http://bit.ly/hv21IJ #MLDW

Wed, 11 May 2011 22:09:42 +0000

joelambert

Everything sorted for tomorrow’s #mldw, see you all in the morn! #jiscexpo

Wed, 11 May 2011 19:01:37 +0000

joelambert

RT @ppetej: Looking forward to the Music Linked Data Workshop tomorrow http://musicnet.mspace.fm/blog/2011/05/10/mldw-programme-abstracts/ #mldw

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:06:03 +0000

ppetej

Looking forward to the Music Linked Data Workshop tomorrow http://musicnet.mspace.fm/blog/2011/05/10/mldw-programme-abstracts/ #mldw

Wed, 11 May 2011 09:57:41 +0000

jrcetic

RT @jpfauconnier: @jrcetic and I will present "Musonto – A Semantic Search Engine Dedicated to Music and Musicians" @ #MLDW :: http://bit.ly/etJEYJ

Wed, 11 May 2011 09:44:18 +0000

CETIC_be

RT @jpfauconnier: @jrcetic and I will present "Musonto – A Semantic Search Engine Dedicated to Music and Musicians" @ #MLDW :: http://bit.ly/etJEYJ

Wed, 11 May 2011 08:55:24 +0000

joelambert

@wiilassie we’ve tried to tailor the day to a broad audience so should be something for everyone. Do you have a particular interest? #mldw

Wed, 11 May 2011 08:17:23 +0000

joelambert

MLDW Programme & Abstracts http://t.co/Ga1VU2D #jiscexpo #mldw via @musicnetproject

Tue, 10 May 2011 14:51:10 +0000

wiilassie

Btw, anyone else going to Music Linked Data Workshop on Thu? #MLDW Programme looks interesting, but think I’m going to be out of my depth!

Tue, 10 May 2011 14:10:27 +0000

joelambert

RT @jpfauconnier: @jrcetic and I will present "Musonto – A Semantic Search Engine Dedicated to Music and Musicians" @ #MLDW :: http://bit.ly/etJEYJ

Tue, 10 May 2011 13:56:14 +0000

jpfauconnier

@jrcetic and I will present "Musonto – A Semantic Search Engine Dedicated to Music and Musicians" @ #MLDW :: http://bit.ly/etJEYJ

Tue, 10 May 2011 12:30:06 +0000

Programme

10:30 – Welcome

Morning Session: Research Papers
Chaired by Richard Polfreman (Music, University of Southampton)

10:35 – MusicNet: Aligning Musicology’s Metadata
David Bretherton, Daniel Alexander Smith, Joe Lambert and mc schraefel (Music, and Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton)

11:05 – Towards Web-Scale Analysis of Musical Structure
J. Stephen Downie (Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), David De Roure (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) and Kevin Page (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford)

11:35 – LinkedBrainz Live
Simon Dixon, Cedric Mesnage and Barry Norton (Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London)

12:05 – BBC Music – Using the Web as our Content Management System
Nicholas Humfrey (BBC)

12:35 – Lunch

Afternoon Session: Funding & Project Presentations
Chaired by David Bretherton (Music, University of Southampton)

13:30 – JISC Funding Roadmap for 2011-12
David Flanders (JISC)

13:45 – Early Music Online: Opening up the British Library’s 16th-Century Music Books
Sandra Tuppen (British Library)

14:00 – Musonto – A Semantic Search Engine Dedicated to Music and Musicians
Jean-Philippe Fauconnier (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and Joseph Roumier (CETIC, Belgium)

14:15 – Listening to Movies – Creating a User-Centred Catalogue of Music for Films
Charlie Inskip (freelance music consultant)

14:30 – Q & A and Discussion Session
Chaired by Geraint Wiggins (Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London)

16:00 – End

Abstracts for Morning Research Papers

MusicNet: Aligning Musicology’s Metadata

David Bretherton, Daniel Alexander Smith, Joe Lambert and mc schraefel (Music, and Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton)

As more resources are published as Linked Data, data from multiple heterogeneous sources should be more rapidly discoverable and automatically integrable, enabling it to be reused in contexts beyond those originally envisaged. 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 music, for instance, 17 sources may independently 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. Alignment is a prerequisite for usable Linked Data, without which resources are effectively stranded rather than integrated. To begin to address this, the MusicNet project has minted URIs for composers, and has published as RDF basic biographical data and – crucially – alignment information for several leading providers of musicological data.

Towards Web-Scale Analysis of Musical Structure

J. Stephen Downie (Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), David De Roure (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) and Kevin Page (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford)

SALAMI (Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information) is an ambitious computational musicology project which applies a computational approach to the huge volume of digital recordings now available from such sources as the Internet Archive. It aims to deliver a very substantive corpus of musical analyses in a common framework for use by music scholars, students and beyond, and to establish a web-based methodology and tooling which will enable others to add to this in the future. In its first phase the project has conducted a significant exercise in ground truth collection with 1000 recordings analysed by music students and shortly to be published as open Linked Data.

LinkedBrainz Live

Simon Dixon, Cedric Mesnage and Barry Norton (Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London)

The MusicBrainz dataset is a large open (openly-licensed and open to contribution) collection of metadata about music, containing information on artists, their recorded works, and acoustic fingerprints. The LinkedBrainz project aims at making MusicBrainz Linked Data compliant. Linked Data principles require that the data is made available using an RDF serialisation over HTTP, and that this is interlinked with existing datasets. Linked Data Best Practice encourages an endpoint where queries can be made using the SPARQL query language for RDF. The LinkedBrainz project is rolling out an RDFa annotation of the relevant MusicBrainz pages, and is preparing a SPARQL endpoint and RDF-based dereferencing.  In this talk we will give further details on progress and future work, and will show the utility of the dataset as Linked Data by demonstrating the ease with which ‘mash-ups’ can be formed, based on interlinkage with resources such as DBPedia and BBC Music Reviews.

BBC Music – Using the Web as our Content  Management System

Nicholas Humfrey (BBC)

The BBC Music site provides a page for every artist played on the BBC. These pages use persistent web identifiers for each artist, which serve as an aggregation point for all content and information. By reusing structured data available elsewhere on the Web – the Web becomes our Content Management System. The core metadata is then enhanced with content, such as videos and reviews, from the BBC, thereby providing a compelling audience proposition and also making the BBC content re-aggregatable by other websites, thus contributing to the web as a whole.

Further details: http://www.aes.org/events/130/workshops/?ID=2639

What have we added since January?

Content Negotiation

One of the most important features we’ve added since January is content-negotiation. This enables our Codex to serve up the most appropriate content dependant on the ‘Accept’ header received in the HTTP request. For a more detailed writup see Dan’s blog post on the MusicNet URI Scheme.

A simple example would be:

Franz Schuberts URI is: http://musicnet.mspace.fm/person/7ca5e11353f11c7d625d9aabb27a6174

If we request this from a regular web browser we are dereferenced to the HTML content at: http://musicnet.mspace.fm/person/7ca5e11353f11c7d625d9aabb27a6174.html

However, if we request this URI from a semantic web browser we are dereferenced the RDF content at: http://musicnet.mspace.fm/person/7ca5e11353f11c7d625d9aabb27a6174.rdf

Data Enrichment

We have also been working hard to leverage the data we’ve aligned over the last year to enrich the information provided by our various data partners. Last year we met with the LinkedBrainz team and they provided us with a small set of composer data from MusicBrainz for us to align against. This has allowed us to draw additional information from other open data sources such as the BBC, Wikipedia/DBPedia, IMDB and even the New York Times to provide a more complete representation of the data available about a composer.

This data is available in both the RDF and the HTML representation of the Codex.

e.g. Schubert, Franz (HTML | RDF)

Alignment Progress

Alignment is moving on well and we’re currently at 89%.

What is left to do?

One of the discussions the MusicNet team has been involved in since the start of the project has been data.ac.uk and the need for in perpetuity hosting of URI’s minted by JISC projects.

We’re currently in discussions to be one of the first projects to be able to make use of this domain and hope that by the end of the project we’ll be able to move our Codex and URI’s over to a suitable domain such as musicnet.data.ac.uk. This will ensure that the data we’ve exposed will be available after the project’s end.

MusicNet Workshop

We’re also hosting a small workshop on the 12th May at JISC HQ to try and expose more people to the potential of the MusicNet URI’s. The workshop will also be looking more broadly at the current Music & Linked Data landscape & should cater to a broad audience. It’s filling up very quickly so if you’re interested and haven’t yet made contact please do so soon.

For more details see our announcement

The internet exerts an unprecedented equalizing force in bringing access to information to everyone on the planet. More information is available (and mainly for free) now than ever before, and yet it is becoming clear that access to information is not enough. The infrastructure to store and share data within sectors is a vital part of the ecosystem, and yet it is often treated as an afterthought. We need a radical change in the way we develop infrastructure in the higher education sector, to ensure that services consumed and funded by the public can do their job as efficiently as possible and at the best possible price.

http://cottagelabs.com/strata-2011-review/

This is key, we’ve found that having data isn’t enough (although its a great start!). Making that data available in some meaningful way is more of a challenge. With MusicNet we’re striving to make readily available Musicology information available in a single place under a single search. We’re leveraging Linked Data technologies to better allow others to integrate their own data with our project outputs.

MusicNet is pleased to announce a workshop on Music Linked Data, to be held on 12 May 2011, 10:30-16:00. The event will take place at the JISC London meeting rooms (Brettenham House (South Entrance), 5 Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN).

The morning will feature presentations by the MusicNet team (University of Southampton; MusicNet), David De Roure (University of Oxford; SALAMI), Simon Dixon (Queen Mary UoL; LinkedBrainz), Nicholas Humfrey (BBC; BBC’s music linked data), and David Flanders (JISC; JISC’s plans for linked data). In the afternoon presenters and other exhibitors will be available to answer questions, offer advice on using linked music data, and provide ‘mini-tutorials’ to attendees.

The event will be of equal interest to:

• computer scientists with an interest in music;
• music technologists;
• music librarians and library scientists;
• digital humanities scholars and digital musicologists;
• musicologists planning research projects with an online component or website.

Registration

The workshop is now fully booked – sorry!

However, places may still be available for the AES ‘Music and Semantic Web’ Workshop on 13th May. See http://www.aes.org/events/130/workshops/?ID=2639 for details.

Further Information

Further information and updates about the workshop will be published at http://musicnet.mspace.fm/blog/music-linked-data-workshop/ in due course. If you have any questions, please email David at D.Bretherton@soton.ac.uk.