[pdb-discuss] Re: Somewhere to start

[Yves Raimond]

Hello!

As it is my first post on the list, I will quickly introduce myself: I
am a PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary,
University of London, and my research is focused on knowledge
management systems for music-related data. I am involved in several
community projects, such as the music ontology [1] and the linking
open data project [2]. The latter may be of interest to you, as it is
a large project aiming at publishing a wide range of open datasets as
RDF+dereferencable identifiers (following the principles described in
[3]) and to interlink them using RDF "links". For example, we might
create a link between a resource representing an artist in the Jamendo
data set and his location in the geonames dataset, which will then
look like:

<http://dbtune.org/jamendo/artist/5> foaf:based_near
<http://sws.geonames.org/2991627/>.

Therefore allowing agents using this data to jump smoothly from one
dataset to another.

We already published and interlinked, among others, Jamendo,
Magnatune, Musicbrainz, Wikipedia/DbPedia, US Census data and DBLP.

There is a really active mailing list for this project at [4].

[snip]

> I think designing a domain model that will really work for everything is
> *hard* so I think we should try and keep things simple and then refactor
> (suggestions as to what would be simplest are very welcome).

For this, I suggest using a model based on the music ontology [1],
which seems to match your needs (and if it doesn't, we'll work on it:)
). It describes the workflow leading to a particular record, through a
chain of events (composition, arrangement, performance, recording,
etc.). Check [5] for a small depiction of it, and [6] for a short
paper describing it into more details. It has been used for expressing
a wide range of music datasets, from the Royal Scottish Academy for
Music and Drama HotBed datbase to Musicbrainz or the John Peel
sessions.

Of course, I am happy to contribute some python code! Just let me know
if you think this could be useful.

Best regards,
Yves

[1]http://musicontology.com/
[2] http://linkeddata.org/
[3] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
[4] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/linking-open-data
[5] http://musicontology.com/imgs/mo-workflow.jpg
[6] http://moustaki.org/pubs/Raimond-ISMIR2007-Submitted.pdf