BBC's Semantic Music Project
The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.
The BBC Music project has been in beta since June of last year. According to silicon.com, Matthew Shorter, Interactive Editor for Music at the BBC, the project is "a part of a general movement that's going on at the BBC to move away from pages that are built in a variety of legacy content production systems to actually publishing data that we can use in a more dynamic way across the web."
That dynamic backend technology - semantic markup - adds additional context to data about the artist which can include anything from previous bands, past collaborators, venues played, and more. The metadata is then linked together to create relationships that you may not have even known about before.
Most of the information for the project comes from MusicBrainz, an open content music "metadatabase" that lists information for over 400,000 artists. To make a BBC music page, the contextual information surrounding the artist is imported to their BBC page. By using the artist's "MusicBrainzID," web page creators can integrate the artist's Wikipedia biography, too. Reusing this content is a better use of their time and energy, says Shorter, because the content is already available on the public domain.
As more projects like this take advantage of the publicly available metadata available, the beginnings of a real semantic web can finally take root.
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IMO, this is the first commerical site that is powered by Linked Data. So if somebody asks you where is the Semantic Web, show them BBC Music! From a front end, it seems like a mashup app. The beauty is the back end, all powered by Linked Data!
We get some (already existing) metadata about which albums a band has produced, chuck in a bit of info about which Radio 1 DJ has played that band the most, and now the semantic web begins?
The semantic web is admittedly a slow burner :) but that's just the way it is; there isn't going to be any one single thing that allows you to say, "ah...that was the day that a real semantic web finally took root".
Don't get me wrong, I like what the BBC has done here, but there's a lot of far more interesting stuff around.
Regards,
Mark
Mark Birbeck
http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
This is another great step forward. Linked Data movement is slowly but surely proving its worth.
Basically the data is now out there and it is up to developers to create useful apps.
(albeit the non-verticals data is sometimes very poorly interlinked)
@juan: ah, there are many sites using MusicBrainz database... technically it is linked data, even when not exposed as such.
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Important step forward (however, this has now been around for while, now ;)
We started recently to gather LOD applications, see [1], where BBC music beta is of course listed :)
Cheers,
Michael
[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/Applications
exciting! Just to point out that this is not technically a commercial project since it is BBC. Definitely they are showing something that has the potential to make money, but they probably don't have to for a while! Perhaps this is why the nonprofit space will lead the semantic web.
I think this is brilliant, the BBC should be applauded for their transparency and open-mindedness.
Wrote up my full thoughts here:
http://hibbins.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/i-found-out/