First round of revisions for the Music Ontology

Frederick Giasson

After only one day 6 people are already registered to the mailing list of the Music Ontology and many suggestions have already be made.

Considering all the enthusiasm this new Music Ontology seems to generate, and considering all the feedbacks I get from many knowledgeable people, I chose to publish a first list of possible revisions to the ontology.

You can take a look at these propositions on the mailing list. If you have any thoughts about these propositions or have new ones, please subscribe to the group and share them with us via the mailing list.

More on the evolution of the ontology later.

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The Music Ontology: a new ontology based on the MusicBrainz project

Frederick Giasson
Internet changed the music industry. At first, sharing systems like Napster allowed people to share any song they had on their computer with millions other people. That new reality changed the music industry’s landscape for good, and many juridical battles followed. However, a biggest change followed a couple of years later. Communities like MySpace started to appear. Strong of millions of regular users, such communities helped garage bands and obscure musicians to create their musical niche: the longtail of the music industry.

This second change is more profound than the first one: now any musician has the possibility to reach their audience by sharing their work on the Web. In the mean time, a free database called MusicBrainz archiving million of between artists, albums and tracks appeared; music suggesting services like Pandora started to appear and Apple started to sell individual tracks at 1$ with iTunes.

At that point, the music industry of the eighties leaded by blockbusters was completely changed.

Introduction

I am pleased to announce you the publication of a new Music Ontology Specification. I spent the last days writing it having in mind to describe the new MusicBrainz metadatabase structure using RDF and ultimately to write a specification that any music content creator/publisher could use to export the data they are generating.

Please let me know if you find any error in that new ontology, if you have any suggestion to enhance it or if you have any comments.

You can leave comments/suggestions on this blog post or on the related Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/music-ontology-specification-group

The Music Ontology

The Music Ontology is an attempt to link all the information about musical Artists, Albums and Tracks together: from MusicBrainz to MySpace. The goal is to express all relations between musical information to help people finding anything about music and musicians. It is based around the use of machine readable information provided by any web site or web service on the Web.

Why another music ontology?

Leigh Dodds wrote an ontology based on MusicBrainz about 3 years ago called the MusicBrainz Metadata Vocabulary. At that time, the MusicBrainz database was not as developed as the one available today.

For that reason, I choose to write a new ontology, also based on the MusicBrainz project considering that source of information about music. I developed that new ontology having three goals in mind:

  1. I needed to stay as close as possible to the MusicBrainz database.
  2. I need to reuse the basic principles of the MusicBrainz Metadata Vocabulary.
  3. I need, at the same time, to develop a music ontology that people could use in their system (MySpace, Pandora, blogs, Etc.) and not just in conjunction with the MusicBrainz relational database.

The first goal explains why this new ontology is so influenced by the MusicBrainz database. In fact, most of the classes, properties came from the relations described in the database, and most of the descriptions of these relations came from the wiki of the project.

The second goal explains why the basic classes of the Music Ontology are the same as the one in the MusicBrainz Medata Vocabulary.

The third goal explains why the name and the namespace of the MusicBrainz Metadata Vocabulary have been changed.

What next?

From that point, I will export a RDF version of the MusicBrainz ontology using that new music ontology. Then I’ll index this new RDF data into the triple store, based on Ping the Semantic Web, I talked about a couple of weeks ago (a first version should be released soon by the way).

From that point, people will be able to query the MusicBrainz ontology using the SPARQL endpoint. As I shown in the specification with a couple of SPARQL queries, people will have much more ways to query the database to answer their questions about music things.

More Information

For more information please read the entire Music Ontology Specification.

The ontology has 19 classes and 58 properties.

The namespace of the ontology is http://purl.org/ontology/mo and the prefix I suggest to use is “mo”.

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From a Web where data worth Everything to a Web where data worth Nothing

Frederick Giasson
I am afraid that people will be afraid of what I’ll say here, but: we are slowly, but surely, switching from a Web where Data worth everything to a Web where Data worth nothing.Why people are afraid of that? Because such a switch adds insecurity into their plans, their businesses and so their lives. Such people will ask themselves:

How the hell should I do money if my data worth nothing? What my business plan will be? How should I manage that? Nah, that guy is crazy, it will never happens in my life time… data worth just too much on the Web!

Knowledge is power after all!

Yeah knowledge is power. But the question is: is data the knowledge? Is knowledge a synonym of data?

I don’t think so. Data is nothing; data worth nothing; data is everywhere; data is generated by anything on this Planet.

Data worth nothing, it is what you will do with data, how you will use it, how you will process it that worth everything.

Data worth nothing; this is the process getting data to create knowledge that worth everything.

The key of a successful business plan in a Web where data worth nothing is the process: how to manipulate, how to do calculations over that data to make it meaningful and knowledgeable?

This is the process that worth everything in a Web where data worth nothing.

Now that I say that, check what will happen with the Web in 5 years.

The conclusion of this story is not to be afraid to give your data away. In any case, you can only benefit from doing so.

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