I am pleased to publish the revision 1.10 of the Music Ontology. As you can see in the change log:
many things changed in that revision of the ontology. In fact, all the ambiguities people noticed with the latest revisions should now be fixed. Yves Raimond worked hard to implement the Time Ontology along with its Event and Timeline Ontologies into the Music Ontology. The result is a major step ahead for the Music Ontology. Now different levels of expressiveness are available trough the ontology.
In fact, one can describe simple things like MusicBrainZ data and relations, or they can describe the recording of a gig on a cell phone, published on the web, by two different people. Take a look at the updated examples to see what each of these three levels of expressiveness can describe.
As you can see, all the examples are now expressed in N3 and XML. These examples are classified in three different levels of descriptiveness. Most people will describe musical things using the first level of expressiveness, however closed and specialized systems will be able to express everything they want related to music using the Musical Ontology (check examples level 2 and 3 for good examples of this new expressiveness power)
One of the last things we have to fix is how genres should be handled. Right now we are typing individuals with its genre. However considering that genres evolve and change really quickly and that they are strongly influenced by cultures, a suggestion has been made to create individuals out of the class Genre and then describing them. Also, we could create s mo:subGenre property (domain: mo:Genre; range: mo:Genre) that would relate a genre to its sub-genre(s).
This idea is really great and would probably be the best way to describe genres considering their “volatile” meaning over time. However the question is: how to link a mo:MusicalWork, mo:MusicalExpression, mo:MusicalManifestation and mo:Sound to its genre? If we create a mo:genre (domain mo:MusicalWork… etc; range rdf:resource), then people could use that property to link a MusicalWork, etc. to anything (anything that is a resource). Personally I think that it is not necessarily a good thing to introduce such a non-restricted property into the ontology.
Note that it is not the same thing as the property event:hasFactor since anything can be a factor of a musical event.
Now that the ontology is becoming pretty stable, the next step is starting to use it to describe things related to music. The first step will be to convert MusicBrainZ’s data into RDF using the Music Ontology. Soon enough I should make available a RDF dump of this data along with a Virtuoso PL that will enable people to re-create this RDF dump from a linked instance of a MusicBrainZ Postgre database into Virtuoso
Finally I would like to give a special thanks to Yves for its hard work and involvement for the publication of that new revision of the Music Ontology.
Technorati: Music | ontology | events | performance | time | semantic | web | musicbrainz | |