MusicNet: Aligning Musicology’s Metadata

As more resources are published as Linked Data, data from multiple heterogeneous sources should be more rapidly discoverable and automatically integrable, enabling it to be reused in contexts beyond those originally envisaged. But Linked Data is not of itself a complete solution. One of the key challenges of Linked Data is that its strength is also a weakness: anyone can publish anything. So in music, for instance, 17 sources may independently publish data about ‘Schubert’, but there is no de facto way to know that any of these Schuberts are the same, because the sources are not aligned. Alignment is a prerequisite for usable Linked Data, without which resources are effectively be stranded rather than integrated. To begin to address this, the MusicNet project has minted URIs for composers and exposed as RDF basic biographical data to aid disambiguation, and, crucially, alignment information for several leading providers of musicological data.