FOAF-ing the music, RDF templates and suggesting content
Oscar Celma introduces a service that includes music interests in your FOAF profile. Instead of writing and updating them yourself regularly, the script will search (using SPARQL) in your profile for websites that share playlists (last.fm, pandora …) and create an updated FOAF file with your interests. I really like this approach of decentralized content to create RDF files … let computers do the job for you !
Yet I’m wondering if the script can have an option to return only the portion of RDF that should be included. It makes me think we can have "templated-RDF" that will query services to be constructed / updated. Using Oscar’s service, I can include this in my profile:
<tpl:hasService>
<tpl:Service rdf:resource="http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu/RDFize/me">
<tpl:hasParameter>
<tpl:Parameter>
<tpl:has_name>foaf</tpl:has_name>
<tpl:has_value>http://apassant.net/foaf.rdf</tpl:has_value>
</tpl:Parameter>
</tpl:hasParameter>
<tpl:hasParameter>
<tpl:Parameter>
<tpl:has_name>account</tpl:has_name>
<tpl:has_value>http://last.fm</tpl:has_value
</tpl:Parameter>
</tpl:hasParameter>
</tpl:Service>
</tpl:hasService>
Then, a parser will interpret the file to add /replace this part by the resulting RDF from the service. And then, any service that return RDF could be included. Do someone know if such features already exist ?
In the meantime, I also discovered the Music Use Case, from the same team. It briefly shows how, using music metadata and people interest, it helps to suggest relevant artist and concerts, as last.fm does, but using Semantic Web technologies. This is also something I like in Semantic Web, metadata, ontologies and linked data, and it makes me think to an approach I’ll present at ICWSM, regarding blogs and information retrieval.
The Music Ontology
A new and exciting project in the Semantic Web area: The Music Ontology, by Frederic Giasson (PTSW, TalkDigger).
Its goal is to provide a vocabulary to describe Artists, Releases, Songs and so on in RDF. It is mainly based on the MusicBrainz Metadata Vocabulary, but with new improvements as defining relationships between artists and links to external services. And, most important thing, a lot of triples from the current MusicBrainz database should be available in a few weeks. A mailing-list has been launched for discussions and improvements.
I was waiting for this kind of vocabulary (and data) for some time (as I never took time to look as MBz database export) especially to easilly find all covers of a given song. From another point of view, I’ll be happy to use it to represent - and query - various releases of a given record (using the mo:other_release_of property), especially for vynil records with reissues (so what about a mo:reissue property ?) with different colors, inner sleeve …
Well, finally what about converting the FLEX book in RDF to query this huge punk and hardcore database (and use its URIs for want-lists) ?
Only stupid bastards …
En passant à la Fnac hier, je me suis rendu compte que tous les nouveaux disques EMI étaient Copy Control, ce qui empèche la copie (ou même l’encodage) mais surtout bloque la lecture sur pas mal d’appareils.
Le débat DADVSI a pas mal fait parler de lui ces derniers mois, mais c’est seulement hier que ça m’a fait repenser à ce disque de Conflict[1]:
[2]
Record shops directory on ning.com
I’m happy to announce my first ning.com application. For those who don’t know, ning is a free playground to easilly create social applications.
So, my first app is RecordShops, located at http://recordshops.ning.com. It aims to be a worldwide directory of independant music shops[1] where users can freely add their shops and tag and/or rate others’ ones. Shops can then be sorted and found by ratings, tags, locations …
The service also provides a map to locate shops - using GoogleMaps - and an RSS feed that lists last added shops.
Have fun, add shops, rate, tag… so that I’ll get news shops to discover next time I’ll go abroad 
Notes
[1] Well, you can add mainstream ones, but I thinks that’s not so fun to discover
Tags: music, ning, recordshops, tags
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