DBTune blog

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.

Just spotted through Paul's blog: the list of accepted ISMIR 2008 papers is now available online. All the papers sound really interesting, so I guess it will be a really good ISMIR!! I am especially glad to see that the Variations3 people will present their work on FRBR-based musical metadata. They seem to have done a lot of interesting things over the last year! I also hope we can make things connect in some ways with MO, thanks to this common FRBR backbone.

Anyway, I can't wait for the actual proceedings which, apparently, will be available online prior to the conference. Quite a few of the selected papers are already available on the Web as pre-prints, though (this really interesting one from Patrick Rabbat and Francois Pachet, for example).

I should have uploaded it earlier, but here is the paper we wrote with Mark Sandler. It describes all the structured data publishing and interlinking work we've been doing over the last year, based on the Music Ontology framework we described last year. We tried to illustrate that by (hopefully) fun examples (Mozart and Metallica are closer than you think... :-) ). It also describes a SPARQL-based web service for feature extraction, driven by workflows written in N3.

We learned yesterday that DBTune was nominated for the Triplify Challenge! The other seven projects are really interesting as well, so I guess the competition will be really high! The final results will be given at the I-Semantics conference in early September.

Also, Tim Berners-Lee made a great talk about linked data and the semantic web on Radio 4 earlier today. The first use-case he mentions sounds quite familiar: finding bands based on geo-location data. He already mentioned that in one of his blog posts, linking to this screencast.

An interesting discussion took place on the Linking Open Data mailing list just afterwards, to gather use-cases for explaining to a general public what linked data can be useful for.

For the Mashed event this week end, the BBC released some really interesting data. This includes playcount data, stating how much an artist is featured within a particular BBC programmes (at the brand or episode level).

During the event, I wrote some RDF translators for this data, linking web identifiers in the DBTune Musicbrainz linked data to web identifiers in the BBC Programmes linked data. We used it with Kurt and Ben in our hack. Ben made a nice write-up about it. By finding web identifiers for tracks in a collection and following links to the BBC Programmes data, and finally connecting this Programmes data to the box holding all recorded BBC radio programmes over a year that was available at the event, we can quite easily generate playlists from an audio collection. Two python scripts implementing this mechanism are available there. The first one uses solely brands data, whereas the second one uses episodes data (and therefore helps to get fewer and more accurate items in the resulting playlist). Finally, the thing we spent the most time on was the SQLite storage for our RDF cache :-)

This morning, I published the playcount data as linked data. I wrote a new DBTune service for that. It publishes a set of web identifiers for playcount data, interlinking Musicbrainz and BBC Programmes. I also put online a SPARQL end-point holding all this playcount data along with aggregated data from Musicbrainz and the BBC Programmes linked data (around 2 million triples overall).

For example, you can try the following SPARQL query:

SELECT ?brand ?title ?count
WHERE {
   ?artist a mo:MusicArtist;
      foaf:name "The Beatles". 
   ?pc pc:object ?artist;
       pc:count ?count.
   ?brand a po:Brand;
       pc:playcount ?pc;
       dc:title ?title 
    FILTER (?count>10)}

This will return every BBC brand that has featured The Beatles more than 10 times.

Thanks to Nicholas and Patrick for their help!