DBTune blog

We recently announced on the BBC backstage blog the availability of two SPARQL end-points, one hosted by Talis and one by OpenLink. These two companies aggregated the RDF data we publish at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes and http://www.bbc.co.uk/music. This opens up quite a lot of fascinating SPARQL queries. Talis already compiled a small list, and here are a couple I just designed:

• Give me programmes that deal with the fictional character James Bond - results

PREFIX po: <http://purl.org/ontology/po/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
SELECT ?uri ?label
WHERE {
  ?uri po:person 
    <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/people/bmFtZS9ib25kLCBqYW1lcyAobm8gcXVhbGlmaWVyKQ#person> ; rdfs:label ?label
}

• GIve me artists that were featured in the same programme as the Foo Fighters - results

PREFIX po: <http://purl.org/ontology/po/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX mo: <http://purl.org/ontology/mo/>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX event: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#>
PREFIX tl: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/timeline.owl#>
SELECT DISTINCT ?artist2 ?label2
WHERE {
  ?event1 po:track ?track1 .
  ?track1 foaf:maker <http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/67f66c07-6e61-4026-ade5-7e782fad3a5d#artist> .
  ?event2 po:track ?track2 .
  ?track2 foaf:maker ?artist2 .
  ?artist2 rdfs:label ?label2 .
  ?event1 po:time ?t1 .
  ?event2 po:time ?t2 .
  ?t1 tl:timeline ?tl .
  ?t2 tl:timeline ?tl .
  FILTER (?t1 != ?t2)
}

• Give me programmes that featured both Al Green and the Foo Fighters (yes! there is one result!!) - results

PREFIX po: <http://purl.org/ontology/po/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX mo: <http://purl.org/ontology/mo/>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX event: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#>
PREFIX tl: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/timeline.owl#>
SELECT DISTINCT ?programme ?label
WHERE {
  ?event1 po:track ?track1 .
  ?track1 foaf:maker <http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/67f66c07-6e61-4026-ade5-7e782fad3a5d#artist> .
  ?event2 po:track ?track2 .
  ?track2 foaf:maker <http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/fb7272ba-f130-4f0a-934d-6eeea4c18c9a#artist> .
  ?event1 po:time ?t1 .
  ?event2 po:time ?t2 .
  ?t1 tl:timeline ?tl .
  ?t2 tl:timeline ?tl .
  ?version po:time ?t .
  ?t tl:timeline ?tl .
  ?programme po:version ?version .
  ?programme rdfs:label ?label .
}

• All programmes that featured an artist originating from Northern Ireland - results

PREFIX po: <http://purl.org/ontology/po/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX mo: <http://purl.org/ontology/mo/>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX event: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#>
PREFIX tl: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/timeline.owl#>
PREFIX dbprop: <http://dbpedia.org/property/>
PREFIX owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>
SELECT DISTINCT ?programme ?label ?artistlabel ?dbpmaker
WHERE {
  ?event1 po:track ?track1 .
  ?track1 foaf:maker ?maker .
  ?maker rdfs:label ?artistlabel .
  ?maker owl:sameAs ?dbpmaker .
  ?dbpmaker dbprop:origin <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Northern_Ireland> .
  ?event1 po:time ?t1 .
  ?t1 tl:timeline ?tl .
  ?version po:time ?t .
  ?t tl:timeline ?tl .
  ?programme po:version ?version .
  ?programme rdfs:label ?label .
}

(Note that we just need the owl:sameAs in the above query as the Talis end-point doesn't support inference)

Let us know what kind of query you can come up with this data! :-)

I just posted a small article on the BBC Radio Labs blog about the new features of the BBC Programmes website. Hopefully that makes some sense and highlights some of the things we've been working on over the last six months! Spoiler: lots of nice nice RDF :-)

I just uploaded my PhD thesis entitled A Distributed Music Information System, which I defended on the 22nd of January. My examiners were David de Roure from University of Southampton and Nicolas Gold from King's College. My PhD supervisor was Mark Sandler.

Here is the abstract:

Information management is an important part of music technologies today, covering the man- agement of public and personal collections, the construction of large editorial databases and the storage of music analysis results. The information management solutions that have emerged for these use-cases are still isolated from each other. The information one of these solutions manages does not benefit from the information another holds.

In this thesis, we develop a distributed music information system that aims at gathering music- related information held by multiple databases or applications. To this end, we use Semantic Web technologies to create a unified information environment. Web identifiers correspond to any items in the music domain: performance, artist, musical work, etc. These web identifiers have structured representations permitting sophisticated reuse by applications, and these representations can quote other web identifiers leading to more information.

We develop a formal ontology for the music domain. This ontology allows us to publish and interlink a wide range of structured music-related data on the Web. We develop an ontology evaluation methodology and use it to evaluate our music ontology. We develop a knowledge representation framework for combining structured web data and analysis tools to derive more information. We apply these different technologies to publish a large amount of pre-existing music-related datasets on the Web. We develop an algorithm to automatically relate such datasets among each other. We create automated music-related Semantic Web agents, able to aggregate musical resources, structured web data and music processing tools to derive and publish new information. Finally, we describe three of our applications using this distributed information environment. These applications deal with personal collection management, enhanced access to large audio streams available on the Web and music recommendation.

So far, just a PDF is available, as I am still fighting with LaTeX2HTML, but there will be an HTML version some time soon :-) I am also planning to upload, at the same place, some extra annexes and extra results I didn't include in the main document. I think I will also blog here about some of the things included in this thesis.

In case you just want to jump to a particular chapter, I will just give some keywords to the different thesis chapters below:

1. Introduction
2. Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web technologies: FOL, Description Logics, RDF, Linked Data, OWL, N3.
3. Conceptualisation of music-related information: web ontologies, music ontology, time ontology, event ontology, workflow-based modelling
4. Evaluation of the Music Ontology framework: ontology evaluation, data-driven evaluation, task-based evaluation, latent dirichlet allocation
5. Music processing workflows on the Web: workflows, concurrent transaction logic, N3, N3-Tr, DLP, publication of dynamically generated results, Semantic Web Services
6. A web of music-related data: linking open data, dbtune, automated interlinking, quantification of structured web data
7. Automated music processing agents: N3-Tr, Henry, music analysis, workflows, prolog
8. Case studies: gnat, gnarql, personal music collection management, zempod, music recommendation
9. Conclusion

I completed the move of DBTune to a new shiny server yesterday. Things should go way faster, and the server should have a much better uptime. Overall, our experience with 1and1 hosting has been pretty bad: random server reboots, configuration files erased for no reason, and extremely long delays in getting customer support...

Many many thanks to the Centre for Digital Music for hosting the new DBTune!

Still more fancy linked data to play with - just a couple of weeks after Freebase announced that they publish linked data, OpenCalais just announced that they are going to publish linked data as well, by joining up the results of their entity extraction service to DBpedia URIs.

Just a small post, live from ISWC: Freebase does linked data!

You can try it there, and you can try this instance, for example.

Added to the wonderful David Huynh's Parallax, that's a lot of great news coming from the other side of the Atlantic :-)

Now, to see whether their linked data actually use the Web! Do they link to other web identifiers, available outside Freebase?

I just noticed something weird, also: the read/write permissions are attached to the tracks/films/whatever resources, instead of being attached to the RDF document itself.

The UMBEL people (Fred and Mike) just released a new interlinkage diagram. This time, it doesn't represent the different links amongst datasets made available within the Linking Open Data project, but rather a map of the links amongst vocabularies used on the data web.

The Music Ontology sits right between FOAF, FRBR and the Event ontology (although I would have added the Timeline ontology as well). There is also the Programmes Ontology, at the bottom (which is also interlinked with the Event ontology, btw).

This diagram really helps to see how the current web ontology landscape is structured, and I hope we can keep use it to keep track of the evolution of web ontologies, a bit like what has been done for the available datasets and interlinks.

I submitted DBTune to the Triplify challenge, a couple of months ago. The text of the submission is there. The results of the challenge were given on Friday, at the i-semantics conference. Many many thanks to Michael Hausenblas for representing DBTune there!

And, DBTune won the second prize! Here is a picture of the prize ceremony:

Congratulations to the winners, LinkedMDB, for their amazing work and well-deserved prize, and many thanks to Sören Auer for organizing the challenge!

I just moved the semantic search demo to a faster server, so it should hopefully be a lot more reliable. This demo uses the amazing ClioPatria on top of an aggregation of music-related data. This aggregation was simply constructed by taking a bunch of Creative Commons MP3s, running GNAT on them, and crawling linked data starting from the web identifiers outputted by GNAT.

I also set up the search tab to work correctly. For example, when you search for "punk", you get the following results.

Note that the results are explained: "punk" might be related to the title, the biography, a tag, the lyrics, content-based similarity to something tagged as punk (although it looks like Henry crashed in the middle of the aggregation, so not a lot of such data is available yet), etc. Moreover, you get back different types of resources: artists, records, tracks, lyrics, performances etc.

For example, if you click on one of the records, you get the following.

This record is available under a Creative Commons license, so you can get a direct access to the corresponding XSPF playlist, Bittorrent items etc., by following the Music Ontology "available as" property. For example, you can click on an XSPF playlist, and listen to the selected record.

Of course, you can still do the previous things - plotting music artists (or search results, just take a look at the "view" drop-down box) on a map, on a time-line, browse using facets, etc.

Btw, if you like DBTune, please vote for it in the Triplify Challenge! :-)

Just a couple of minutes ago on the Music Ontology mailing list, Nicholas Humfrey from the BBC announced the availability of linked data on BBC Music.

$ rapper -o turtle \
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234

[...]
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234#artist>
   a mo:MusicGroup;
   foaf:name "Coldplay";
   owl:sameAs <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Coldplay>;
   mo:member
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/18690715-59fa-4e4d-bcf3-8025cf1c23e0#artist>,
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/d156ceb2-fd90-4e82-baea-829bbdf1c127#artist>,
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/6953c4db-7214-4724-a140-e87550bde420#artist>,
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/98d1ec5a-dd97-4c0b-9c83-7928aac89bca#artist>
[...]

This is just really, really, really great... Congratulations to the /music team!

Update: Tom Scott just wrote a really nice post about the new BBC music site, explaining what the BBC is trying to achieve by going down the linked data path.