First of all, thanks for your comment about the Music Ontology.

My first question would be: did you take a look at the latest revision of the ontology? (1.11). Many things changed since then. Also, I would suggest you to subscribe to the mailing list of the ontology to share these thoughts with the other member of the community!

[quote post="761"]1.) One of the cool things about FRBR is its ability to relate different expressions of the same work together. In music, this typically could mean that I would have the Audio and the Score be the same WORK, but a different EXPRESSION. This may also hold true for things such as remixes, etc. In fact, Barbara Tillet has produced a chart for the difference between identical works, and the same work but a different expression. (consult page 4 of this document: http://www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF) Are you specifically trying to limit this to audio-based expressions?[/quote]

No definitely not. Please take a look at the Musical Creations Workflow. I think that it will answer to these questions. At first, the FRBR ontology hasn’t been properly integrated, howerver I think that with the latest revision, many things have been fixed. Please tell me what you think about it.

[quote post="761"]2.) Instead of, or complimentary to, the FOAF Agent object, you might want to have a look at the draft proposal of the Functional Requirements and Number of Name Authority Records. (http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm). According to this document, and to the FRBR document, a ‘corporate body’ is any entity that is a collection of two or more people. (’corporate’ being understood not in the business sense, but in the collective sense). In that sense, a ‘musical group’ is a corporate body. This, along with the attributes described in FRANAR, allows you to encapsulate corporate history. You could, I suppose, also describe relationships within that corporate body. (i.e. “Mick Jagger” is a person, but is a member of “The Rolling Stones,” a corporate body.)[/quote]

Well yeah. Two things in that situation then, or we put mo:CorporateBody as a subclass of frbr:CorporateBody, or we check if foaf:Organization can be equivalent to frbr:CorporateBody. The goal here would be to link these ontologies together at the ontologies level.

[quote post="761"]3.) Who do you envision as the user group for this ontology?[/quote]

What you mean? The people that could use it? Anybody; from anyone who has a foaf profile, the edition company, the producer, the artists, the sellers (amazon), the bbc, etc. Check out my latest post about MO to get some projects developed by other people that shows a little bit of what can be done with that ontology.

Take care!

Salutations,

Fred

I’m new to this ontology, but I’d like to say ‘good job!’ I thought I would make a couple of observations:

1.) One of the cool things about FRBR is its ability to relate different expressions of the same work together. In music, this typically could mean that I would have the Audio and the Score be the same WORK, but a different EXPRESSION. This may also hold true for things such as remixes, etc. In fact, Barbara Tillet has produced a chart for the difference between identical works, and the same work but a different expression. (consult page 4 of this document: http://www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF) Are you specifically trying to limit this to audio-based expressions?

2.) Instead of, or complimentary to, the FOAF Agent object, you might want to have a look at the draft proposal of the Functional Requirements and Number of Name Authority Records. (http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm). According to this document, and to the FRBR document, a ‘corporate body’ is any entity that is a collection of two or more people. (’corporate’ being understood not in the business sense, but in the collective sense). In that sense, a ‘musical group’ is a corporate body. This, along with the attributes described in FRANAR, allows you to encapsulate corporate history. You could, I suppose, also describe relationships within that corporate body. (i.e. “Mick Jagger” is a person, but is a member of “The Rolling Stones,” a corporate body.)

3.) Who do you envision as the user group for this ontology?

If I’ve misunderstood something, let me know.

Yeah you are right, but this is an error I made when I get the info from the frbr final report.

Also, for the album/track discussion, please report you to that web page to read what I am suggesting:

http://tinyurl.com/2gocl5

Salutations,

Fred

Near the top of the 1.01 revision you define: “Expression: A realization of a single work usually in a physical form.”

Tracks and Albums are interesting in that- though I think they are obviously manifestation-derived entities (album of course refers to the housing in which phonographic records were distributed), in time they did in a sense become expression-related entities as artists consciously adapted their compositions to the structure and limitations of the medium- for example, with the “concept album” of unified songs, some of them merely short segues between other songs. And now with the iPod and MP3, the album may have finally reached the limits of its relevance.

Yet if we consider both entities more abstractly, I think we see that “Track” is merely a singular/atomic musical composition, and “Album” is an aggregate musical composition composed of one or more distinct “Tracks”. The original nomenclature you used is not inherently bad, but I think does not sound quite right when applied to classical music. Should we really call an opera an instance of “Album” and an aria within that opera an instance of “Track”?

Regards,

Jonathan

Thanks for these comments. For your first statement, you are completely right, naturally. Unfortunately I don’t see where I wrote that definition? Could you please tell me where you read that?

After that, for the distinction between MusicalExpression and MusicalManifestation I will have to clarify things.

In fact, I see an Album and a Track not has manifestation, but as Work or expression. In fact, the physical embodiment of a track will be via a CD, etc (so, MusicalManifestation). But a track, is an artistic creation. When an artist (musicien) compose a track for an album, he perform an artistic creation, no?

Please tell me how you see the distinction between MusicalWork, MusicalExpression and MusicalWork.

Okay, I will take a look at this when I’ll get a moment. I should take the time to revize the ontology in a couple of days with people comments.

Take care!

Salutations,

Fred

Another thing you might find useful are the controlled/enumerated values already defined in bibliographic data interchange formats for music-related attributes (musical genre, instrument, etc.). I have created several unified lists based upon enumerations from MARC21 and UNIMARC:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat_Technical_Design/Music_Enumerated_Types

There are a couple of issues related to your misunderstanding of the FRBR entity Expression. You define it as: “A realization of a single work usually in a physical form.” In fact Expression has no physical characteristics (this is part of the Manifestation entity); a better definition is “A realization of a single work in a fixed notation or expressive form.” For music, possible expressive forms would include sound recording, sheet music, etc. Some of your MusicalExpression subclasses seem to incorporate publication-related distinctions (e.g. “Track”, “AudioBook”) that are only meaningful at the Manifestation level.

No I didn’t contacted them.

About the frbr:CorporateBody, I thought about it but I wanted to use the foaf ontology instead. Since the frbr:CorporateBody is equivalent to the union clas of foaf:Organization, foaf:Group, etc, I wanted to use foaf:Agent instead, so all the BIO, REL, etc. ontology could be reuse to describe the relationship between people, groups, organization, etc.

About mo:Album, you could be right, we should get feedback from people. But in my opinion, an album is a Work. In fact, it is an artistic creation. But since it is an abstract class, it is why I added a layer called a mo:MusicalWork that is a musical work (so a specialization of a Work).

However, I am open to any suggestion to change that.

Take care,

Fred

I had a small role in the FRBR ontology. Have you talked to Rich and Ian about your modelling? I think some of it isn’t quite right.

For example, foaf:Group should probably be a subclass of frbr:CorporateBody (the “corporate” does not refe to corporations).

Also, I’m not so sure I’d call an Album a subclass of a Work. FRBR is particularly powerful with stuff like clasical music, where a work would be something like a symphony, which is expressed in recorded performances (as well as musical scores), and embodied in recordings (including albums).

I don’t have time to get into this in detail, but just suggesting you look for feedback from those guys, and also the FRBR world (they have a mailing list).

Yeah, you are completely right, thanks for reporting that little glitch.

I just fixed it accordingly.

Take care,

Fred