LinkedBrainz

Two new researchers have started on the LinkedBrainz project: in March, Cedric Mesnage joined us from the University of Lugano where he just submitted his PhD, and in April, Barry Norton joined from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology where he was working on the SOA4All.eu and PlanetData.eu projects.

The question was recently posed, how many pages will contain RDFa in the new MusicBrainz release?  Here are some "back of the napkin" calculations.

In the most recent NGS database dump we have:

This post is intended to describe, in some detail, the implementation of RDFa within the MusicBrainz NGS codebase.  The casual reader will perhaps not be interested in these details.  The intended audience includes future LinkedBrainz/MusicBrainz developers or other developers faced with the task of injecting RDFa into a Model-View-Template web application.

One of the great strengths of the MusicBrainz project is disambiguation.  Each artist, label, release, release group, recording gets its own universally unique identifier or, in MusicBrainz parlance, an MBID.  This allows us to easily distinguish between two recordings of the same work or two artists that happen to have the same name.

We have previously discussed RDB2RDF technology and found some information about available implementations.  Now we have further explored some of the implementation options.  In our survey, we found that there are basically two viable production-level tools for making SPARQL queries against a relational database: the Virtuoso server and the D2R server.