The last revision of the Music Ontology (1.12) is finally out - it took indeed some time to get through all the suggested changes on the TODO list! So, what's new in this release?

  • The Instrument concept is now linked to Ivan's taxonomy of Musical Instrument expressed in SKOS, and extracted from the Musicbrainz instrument taxonomy ;
  • Some peer-2-peer related concepts (Bittorrent and ED2K, two new subconcepts of MusicalItem) ;
  • Large amount of URI refactoring for predicates: camelCase becomes camel_case, and nouns are used instead of verbs, to be more N3 compliant. The older predicates are still in the ontology, but marked as deprecated, and declared as being owl:sameAs the newer predicates - so datasets still using the old ones won't hold dead links ;
  • A large number of term description have been re-written to clearly state in which case they should be use, when it can be a bit ambiguous. For example, available_as and free_download: one links to an item (something like ed2k://...), and the other one links to a web page giving access to the song (perhaps through a Flash player) ;
  • Terms are annotated by a mo:level property, specifying to which level (1,2 or 3) they belong. Terms in level 1 allow to describe simple editorial information (ID3v1-like), terms in level 2 allow to describe workflow information (this work was composed by Schubert, performed 10 times, but only 2 of these performances have been recorded, and terms in level 3 allow to describe the inner structure of the different events composing this worflow (at this time, this performer was playing in this particular key) ;
  • But surely, this release main improvement lies into the infrastructure for maintaining the code and the documentation. MO has now a dedicated SourceForge project, with a subversion repository holding the up-to-date RDF code, all the tool chain allowing to generate the whole specification, and a couple of related projects (which I will describe in more details in later posts). Drop me a line if you want to be registered as a developer on the project!

Still, there are a couple of things I'd like to do before the end of the week, like replacing the examples (some of which are pretty out-dated, or just wrong) by real-world MO data (as there begins to quite a lot available out-there:-) ).

Anyway, thanks to everyone who contributed to this release (especially Fred and Chris, and all the people on the mailing list who suggested changes)!!