Linked Data & the BBC Music Platform Relaunch

Posted on April 14, 2009
Filed Under art, community, creative commons, data portability, linked data, online collaboration, online music, online search, online video, semantic web, social media | View Comments

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The new BBC web platform for music is online, offering some kind of mash-up presentations of the artists that make use of semantic resources.

The main source for retrieving and mashing the informations (together with sites like Wikipedia and MySpace) is MusicBrainz, a “user-maintained community music meta-database”, which offers the end-user the possibility to edit the data.

This is done by creating a free account; then you gain access to the data, some portions of which are placed into the Public Domain and others are covered by a Creative Commons license.

MusicBrainz is already offering discographical information on about 350,000 artists.

So what’s so semantic about it? The use of RDF/XML for describing music metadata, in connection with the BBC platform through the use of Linked Data.

From a media company’s perspective, there are some points on why Linked Data could be useful:

the BBC isn’t wasting resources reproducing data already in the Public Domain (MusicBrainz & Wikipedia);
findability is increased from a SEO point of view thanks to the proliferations of meaningful links;
Open Content encourages incoming links, extending your range of visibility and the actual usability of the system for the end-users.

What do you think? Any feedback welcome.

Source: Andreas Blumauer / The Semantic Puzzle