Music Entities

Daniel Antal, CFA

Reprex

OpenCollections

Things

  • In this tutorial we show how to create entries for Things like ⏩ musical works and ⏩ sound recording.
  • We have a similar tutorial to for getting tarted with Agents in the online presentation Working with Persons in Wikibase↗, such a adding a composer to a musical work and its sheets, or a performer to a sound recording.
  • Our examples are taken from the music domain. You can add similar photographers or other human agents, as well as software agents like the famous Fruity Loops music creation software agent that aids many musicians. You can add other biological agents, such as pathogens species causing illnesses or natural dyes used in colouring archaic textile costumes.
  • We will create a similar presentation on activities (synonymous with events of processes). These are more advanced topics because recording the time and place component can be rather complicated (e.g., locating an archaeological finding below the surface or an atelier within a building that changed street address many times over the course of history).

Data Model Basics

Recording information on how persons and other Agents (corporate bodies, legal persons) participate in Activities (processes, events) to create or change Things (like literary or music works, dresses, houses.)

Data & Metadata Provenance

A generalised data model about the relationships between ⏩ Activities (such as creation, recording, …), the ⏩ Agents involved in these activities (performers, record labels, …) resulting in abstract ⏩ Things (Music Entities) like musical works, recording, concerts…

Glossary: Music Entities (Things)

Music entities Description
musical work a novel way of playing music, and potentially accompanying it with lyrics; when registered, a sound recording or a sheet of the music is provided for future identification, which is matched with the author’s data and connected to an ISWC identifier.
music sheet a form of recording the work for future performance; when a music publisher makes it available, it receives an ISMN identifier (older sheets have ISBN book identifiers.)
audio recording fixation of sounds [ISRC standard]
music video recording fixation of sounds synchronized with pictures or moving pictures where (a) the fixed sounds are wholly or substantially a musical performance or (b) the recording (3.3) is intended for viewing in association with a recording of a musical performance. [ISRC standard]

Glossary: Music Agents (1/2)

Agent Description
author The author of music or lyrics. Entitled to authors’ right or copyright.
composer The author of a musical work. Entitled to authors’ right or copyright.
lyricist The author of the text of a musical work, or a literary text that is arranged together with a musical work. Entitled to authors’ right or copyright.
performer The performer of a musical work; in case of a sound recording, the performer whose performance is fixed in the recording. They may be entitled to neighbouring or sound recording copyrights.
producer The person or legal entity that produces the recorded fixation of the sound recording. They are entitled to neighbouring or sound recording copyrights.
👉🏿 Agents create Things (like a musical work), and they participate in ⏩ Activities taking place at a location and at a given time (like a sound recording process.)

Glossary: Music Agents (1/2)

Agent Description
rights management (organisations) agents managing the rights on behalf of rights owners. It can be companies whose sole purpose is to ensure that content that has been licensed has delivered royalties that are identified and accounted for. The role can be taken by collective management organisations or by private companies on behalf of songwriters, composers, performers, music publishers, or record labels.
DSP or digital streaming platform Digital service providers (DSPs), or Digital Streaming Platforms are companies or organisations that provide access to services online. DSPs can provide access to music downloads, like Apple’s iTunes Store, or access to streaming music like Spotify, or even provide satellite-delivered content such as SiriusXM in the USA.
👉🏻 agents are often legal persons (for example, music publishing companies) acting on behalf of human agents; in music creation, they can also be software agents (tools that aid performance or notation.)

Glossary: Activities

Activities Description
creation process a process to create a novel piece of work or lyrics, results in a musical work or literary work for text only.
registration process a process to establish the identity of a new work, the rightsholders, and to give it a unique identifier, such as an ISWC for works, or ISRC for recordings, or ISNI/VIAF for newly published authors.
music notation results in a instructions on how to play the musical work, a music sheet or a machine-readable MIDI or music XML file.
publishing process it makes available, usually against royalty payment, a manifestation of the musical work.
️👉🏼 Activities (synonyms with Process or Events) take place in time and at a location with an active involvement of Agents and result in Things, like a musical work, new rights attached to the work, or a sound recording. As nodes they connect 🔙 Agents and 🔙 Music Entities (Things).

Metadata as Statment

“Data is only potential information, raw and unprocessed, prior to anyone actually being informed by it. […] Data must be understood not as an abstract concept but as objects that are potentially informative. […] Metadata Is a Statement about a Potentially Informative Object.” (Pomerantz 2015, p26)

  • metadata is information added to data about how we should understand, use, process the data itself.
  • a statement is a fundamental knowledge carrier, connecting a Ⓢsubject via a 🅿️predicate to an 🅾️object.
  • a simple statement connects a person to her name: ⓈTaylor Swift 🅿️has the birth name 🅾️Taylor Alison Swift.
  • metadata statements connect protected works with persons: ⓈGold Rush →🅿️has a co-author → 🅾️Taylor Alison Swift.
  • ⓈGold Rush (work) 🅿️was recorded by 🅾️Taylor Swift which is identical to ⓈTaylor Swift 🅿️recorded 🅾️Gold Rush (work)

Gold Rush: Statements in AI

spotify:3i19sqYCrCy8RK4qc8hlCg by Emma Stevens was identically titled to spotify:5BK0uqwY9DNfZ630STAEaq by Taylor Swift or spotify:6x9VaGUbiSRvkLEdjeqjsN by the group called Death Cab for Cutie: Gold Rush. Resolving such ambiguities is time consuming for human workers, and usually it is impossible with a single database.

Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) is an essential function in rights management or research. Deduction or inference engines based on an explicit knowledge bases (that can connect various databases, too) can compare billions of statements in minutes, potentially resolving thousands of ambiguous entity statements or (legal, scientific) claims.

Wikibase Data Model

The Wikibase Data Model makes it easy to connect your knowledge into a graph even without software tools. It can also synchronize with proprietary, in-house databases and open knowledge graphs of the world’s great libraries, archives, universities and other knowledge institutions.

Reprexbase is based on Wikibase.

Working with Things

Musical work

Add new language
  • label@en: Violin Concerto No. 2, may use different preferred names in other languages label@hu: 2. hegedűverseny (Bartók)
  • description@en: concerto by Béla Bartók; description@hu Bartók Béla hegedűversenye
  • instance of: musical work (wd:Q2188189)↗;musical work (Q302)⇗ - class that inherits the properties of a standard musical work.
  • identifiers:

Musical work (2)

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Sound Recording

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