In this paper, we introduce OVERTURE|a web application allowing to explore the interlinked catalogs of major music libraries including the French National Library, Radio France and the Philharmonie de Paris. We have rst developed the DOREMUS ontology which is an extension of the well-known FRBRoo model for describing works and expressions as well as the creation process. We have implemented a so-called marc2rdf tool allowing for the conversion and linking of bibliographical entries about music works, interpretations and expressions from their original MARC-format to RDF following this DOREMUS ontology. We present an exploratory search engine prototype that enables to browse through the reconciled collection of bibliographical records of classical music and to highlight the various interpretations of a work, its derivative, its performance casting as well as other rich metadata.
The DOREMUS project1 develops methods to describe, publish, connect
and contextualize music catalogs on the web of data. Our focus is on the
description of classical and traditional musical works as well as their
interpretations (events) [
Data Conversion. The data collected from the BnF and the Philharmonie de Paris (PP) describing music works are represented in the MARC format (UNI{
and INTERMARC variants). A MARC le is a succession of elds, each
carrying a 3-digit label, and sub elds, delimited by the $ symbol (Fig. 1). The
semantics of these elds and sub elds is described in documents issued by The
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)2. Note
that a sub eld tag can change its meaning depending on the eld, under which
it is found. In our example (Fig. 1), the $a tag under the eld 500 stands for
the musical genre (sonata), whereas the same tag under the eld 700 stands
for the composer name (Beethoven). We have developed an open source
prototype that allows for the automatic conversion of UNI- or INTERMARC
bibliographic records to RDF3, implementing the DOREMUS model [
Exploring Linked Classical Music Catalogs with OVERTURE
controlled by speci c vocabularies, such as MIMO5 describing musical
instruments. Therefore, our data conversion methods include an automatic mapping
of string literals to URIs coming from controlled vocabularies. Inspired by the
Datalift platform [
Among the several existing MARC to RDF conversion tools, such as the Catamandu toolkit6 or marcmods2rdf7, the one that is closest in spirit to ours is Marimba8, developed in the context of the Linked Data at the BNE (Biblioteca Nacional de Espan~a) project. Just like our converter, and in contrast to Catmandu and marcmods2rdf, Marimba is based on the IFLA ontologies, including FRBR, and is designed by the help of librarians. However, Marimba focuses on literature library entries, while we implement the DOREMUS model, which is better suited to describe music.
Data Heterogeneities and Linking. Due to the high data heterogeneity,
link discovery in the musical eld becomes a challenging task. To train and test
data linking tools, we have collected benchmark data from the BnF and the
PP, now part of the OAEI instance matching evaluation campagne9. Our tests
with SILK [
OVERTURE: an Exploratory Search Engine for Music OVERTURE (Ontology-driVen Exploration and Recommendation of mUsical REcords) is a modern web application that relies on a Node.JS server sitting in front of a Virtuoso triple store. The web application performs SPARQL queries to access the data via the Node.JS server that could be a Linked Data Fragment server. The user interface is realized with the AngularJS2 library. At the top, a
6 http://librecat.org 7 http://simile.mit.edu/repository/RDFizers/marcmods2rdf/ 8 http://marimba4lib.com 9 http://islab.di.unimi.it/content/im_oaei/2016/#doremus
Lisena et al. navigation bar directs the user towards one of the main concepts in the DOREMUS model (Work, Expression, Performance, Recording, Score, Person), that become distinct sections of the application. Inside each section, the user can lter the list of records shown in a class-speci c and advanced search form. In this way, (s)he can search a performance by choosing a particular location, a performer, or an expression by selecting the musical key, the genre or by searching by title. From these parameters, the server generates the SPARQL query that matches the user information need.
SELECT ?expressions ?title WHERE { ?expressions a frbroo:F22_Self-Contained_Expression ; cidoc:P102_has_title ?title .
mus:U12_has_genre <http://data.doremus.org/vocabulary/genre/si> }
Clicking on a result, more detailed information is shown such as the information about the composer, the casting, a longer descriptive note or di erent expressions. In the future, this selection will contain related expressions, selected through a recommendation algorithm. The application is available at http://overture.doremus.org10.
This work has been partially supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) within the DOREMUS Project, under grant number ANR-14CE24-0020.