DBTune.org

DBTune - Serving music-related RDF since 2007

Linking Open Data

0. Disclaimer

This is a non-commercial site. The information contained in this site has been collected from several sources and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. No copyright has been intentionally violated. If you feel a copyright has been violated please contact me immediately and the material will be removed

1. Introduction

DBTune hosts a number of servers, providing access to music-related structured data, in a Linked Data fashion. All the services hosted here are based on open Web standards such as RDF and candidate recommendations such as SPARQL.

This effort is part of the Linking Open Data on the Semantic Web community project, hosted by the Semantic Web Education and Outreach interest group.

Please do get the Tabulator Firefox Extension. Indeed, I removed the default redirection towards external RDF visualisation services, so all DBTune URIs will look much better if you install it.

Here is a screencast about using DBTune in a friendly audio application.

2. Quick overview of underlying concepts (or the "Semantic Web" in 10 lines... Don't slap me, please)

Resources on the Web can be far more than web pages. They can identify anything: me, a French band, an audio signal, etc.

Such resources have associated representations (accessed, in our case, through HTTP), which may be either human-readable (an XHTML document, for example) or machine-processable (Microformats or RDF). These representations may hold links to further resources, allowing to jump from one resource to another, which may be actually hosted in different places. This is were the Web aspect comes into place.

Let's take an example. The resource http://dbtune.org/jamendo/artist/5 identifies a French band, called Both. Asking for a RDF representation of this resource gives us back the following statement: 

<http://dbtune.org/jamendo/artist/5> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/based_near> <http://sws.geonames.org/2991627/>
We can then follow this link to get to a resource identifying a geographic location, located within the dataset. Moreover, this link is also a resource identifier! So if we don't know what it means to be based_near something, we can still access a representation of it, which would give us statements such as "based_near is a property, and it relates a person or a group of person to a geographical location".

3. Available datasets

The following datasets are available on this server:

  1. Jamendo, holding data from the Jamendo website (SPARQL end-point available, as well as browsable URIs, RDF dump available) ;
  2. Magnatune, holding data from the Magnatune label (SPARQL end-point and browsable URIs, RDF dump available) ;
  3. BBC John Peel sessions, holding data released during the Hackday, 2007 (SPARQL end-point and browsable URIs, RDF dump available) ;
  4. A chord symbol service, holding descriptions of chords, generated on-the-fly (browsable URIs)
  5. AudioScrobbler data, displaying your last 10 played tracks as RDF linked to Musicbrainz dereferencable URIs
  6. MySpace data, providing URIs and associated RDF representations for top-friends and available tracks on MySpace

4. Links to external datasets

The following dataset interlinking have been achieved:

  1. Jamendo to Musicbrainz (using some kind of record linkage technique)
  2. Jamendo to Geonames
  3. Magnatune to DBPedia
  4. John Peel to DBPedia

5. Acknowledgements

All the things provided by this server relies on the work of many people. Let's try to mention a few:

6. Contact

Yves Raimond, Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London

E-mail: yves __at__ dbtune __dot__ org

FOAF