1. technology and computing

Cover Sheet for Proposals
JISC Grant Funding Call
Name of Programme & Strand:
Information Environment 2011 Programme: Deposit of
research outputs and Exposing digital content for
education and research
Programme Tags:
"INF11" and "JISCexpo"
Name of Call Area Bidding For:
Strand B - Expose
Name of Lead Institution:
University of Southampton
Name of Department where project
would be based:
School of Electronics & Computer Science
Full Name of Proposed Project:
MusicNet
Name(s) of Partner HE/FE Institutions
Involved:
Durham University, Royal Holloway
Name(s) of Partner
Company/Consultants Involved:
Grove Music Online, British Library, RISM
Full Contact Details for Primary Lead
and/or Contact for the Project:
Name: mc schraefel
Position: Reader
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 023 8059 8372
Address: School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
SO17 1BJ
Length of Project:
12 Months
Project Start Date:
June 28th 2010
Project End Date:
June 27th 2011
Total Funding Requested from JISC:
£98,068
Funding Broken Down over Financial
Years (April - March)
April 2010 - March 2011: £81,444
April 2011 - June 2011: £16,624
Project Description / Abstract:
PROBLEM: Linked data, while a potentially great asset for accelerating research, is not sufficient
in itself for this purpose. Multiple sources that relate to the same domain knowledge, for instance,
must have some way to be aligned meaningfully to each other (ie. is this Franz Schubert the same
as that Franz Peter Schubert or that F. Schubert).
SOLUTION: In this project, we propose five deliverables to ensure the longevity and usability of
linkable musicological data: (1) authoritative or "minted" URIs for composers that can confidently
be used to align/link related sources, and links to those composers in scholarly data sources (2)
persistence of this URI resource (3) a suite of tools to enable new sources to be easily aligned with
these URIs (4) a Codex to host pointers to any other linked data sources using our URIs (5)
exemplary visualization/exploration interactions to show how the data can be used for knowledge
building.
STAKEHOLDER SUPPORT: We have vetted our approach with key data creation, data service
and HEFCE researchers/teacher stakeholders, and they are excited and on board in collaborating
with us to develop an effective, useful, usable and essential linked data service and associated
assets, grounded in Musicology but generalisable across HEFCE domains.
Keywords describing project:
Linked Data, Musicology, Exposing, RDF, Alignment
I have looked at the example FOI form
at Appendix B and included an FOI form
in the attached bid
YES
I have read the Call, Briefing Paper and
associated Terms and Conditions of
Grant at Appendix D
YES
i
Freedom of information guidance and FOI Withheld Information Form
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aware that information submitted by them to JISC during this tender process, and throughout
the life of any project subsequently funded, may be disclosed upon receipt of a valid request.
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evaluation of the bids received is still underway. The evaluation process is still deemed to be
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•
•
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FOI Withheld Information Form
8. We would like JISC to consider withholding the following sections or paragraphs from
disclosure, should the contents of this proposal be requested under the Freedom of
Information Act, or if we are successful in our bid for funding and our project proposal is made
available on JISC’s website.
9. We acknowledge that the FOI Withheld Information Form is of indicative value only and that
JISC may nevertheless be obliged to disclose this information in accordance with the
requirements of the Act. We acknowledge that the final decision on disclosure rests with
JISC.
Section / Paragraph No.
Relevant exemption from disclosure
under FOI
Justification
ii
MusicNet
1
Appropriateness and Fit to Programme Objectives and Overall Value to the
JISC Community.
1. Problem In any domain, a key activity of researchers is to search for and synthesise data from
multiple sources in order to create new knowledge. In many cases this process is laborious, to the
point of making certain questions nearly intractable because the cost of the search outstrips the
time available to consider the work. As more resources are published as linked data this should
mean that, with appropriate tools, data from multiple heterogeneous sources can be more rapidly
discovered and automatically integrated. This will enable previously intractable queries to be
explored, and more standard queries to be significantly accelerated. But linked data is not of itself
a complete solution. A key challenge of linked data is that its strength is also its weakness:
anyone can publish anything. So in classical music, for instance, 17 sources may publish work on
Schubert, but there is no de facto way to know that any of these Schuberts are the same. The
sources are not aligned. Without alignment, much of the benefit of linked data is diminished:
resources can effectively be stranded rather than discovered, or become tangled nets of only
guessed associations.
2. Proposed Solution To address these problems, this project proposes to produce a suite of
resources and tools that will support effective linked data exploration with a focus in musicology.
The project's original data contribution will be archival, canonical linked data references, aka
“minted” URIs, for classical music composers. These URIs will associate recognized reference
data sources in Musicology like COPAC, RISM, Grove, the British Library, etc (see partner letters)
into standard representative pointers for composers. The original tools contribution will be data
alignment mechanisms that will easily enable domain experts to associate any linked data
resources with our minted reference URIs. The URIs and the alignment tools mean that
musicologists as data contributors will be able to harmonize rather than replicate their resources
with standard sources. Our instructional prototype contribution will be: a Codex and a Visualiser.
The codex will act as a dynamic catalogue of any linked data resource that use our URIs. This
prototype will act as a resource hub for musicologists: they will be able to access it with
confidence of exploring well-aligned, disambiguated resources. Likewise for tool developers, this
hub will be a clear data reference point for testing linked data resources. As an example of these
features - resource hub, research access, tool demonstrator - we will provide a rich temporal
visualisation tool. This visualization will act as a model & service template both of how linked data
can be richly visualised and explored by the researcher, as well as how tool developers might
take advantage of these affordances to develop new tool resources and interactions.
3. Domain We are focusing on musicology because we already have strong relationships with both
commercial and research resource partners in musicology – Grove, BBC, British Library, COPAC,
to name a few – where, through the AHRC musicSpace project we demonstrated how commercial
and research developed heterogeneous data resources could be integrated for rapid exploration
and knowledge building. Both the data partners of this project and our current musicSpace
evaluators are keen to work with us to deliver minted URIs and these associated services that will
make both their existing and new data more useful and usable by musicologists.
4. User Analysis We are focusing on minted URIs and data alignment services within linked data
because our extensive experience in musicSpace with stakeholders and with the data resources
themselves shows this service to be a sine qua non necessity for linked data resources to be
useful and usable.
5. Deliverables. This project will deliver:
a. An archival, canonical reference set of minted musicology URIs (achieved by WP3)
b. An ongoing commitment to maintain this research for ongoing scholarship (achieved by WP7)
c. A suite of tools to support the alignment and integration of new linked data resources for
increased discovery and usefulness (achieved by WP2 and WP4)
d. A backlinks service that will make new link data resources published to our Codex associated
with our minted URIs and thus easy to integrate into new tools and services (achieved with
WP5 and WP6)
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
1
2
e. A model tool to show how these resources can be dynamically added and explored in a rich
hierarchical timeline and visualised alongside other historical events (achieved with WP6)
These deliverables address the following specific aims of the call:
Make a collection of resources available on the Web as structured linked data
The project will produce and publish linked data about classical music composers using data from
publishers partnering on the musicSpace project. This data will be exposed using existing linked
data technology and will form the basis of an online source of canonical data about (and, in time,
comprehensive index of) musical composers. It is intended that as well as exposing basic metadata about each composer (for example birth/death date and nationality) the linked data will
provide URLs that reference back into the online web catalogues of our data partners so that
musicologists can immediately access all relevant data from each partner collection. Composer
data is fundamental to the work of musicologists and music educators, and we see this as the
essential first step in the provision of linked data services for classical music.
Due to the nature of linked data, and the requirement to support the hosting of the data output of
the project past the project end date, we have agreed with the ECS systems team (see supporting
letter) to develop a best practice for a packaged lightweight linked data deployment strategy, to
enable ECS to sustain hosting of the linked data at the permanent URIs into the future. A report
on our best practice recommendations for lightweight hosting of linked data will be published (see
Appendix A).
As part of producing the linked data, unique URIs will need to be minted for each composer that
exist within the data partners’ current datasets. The project team comprises experts from both
musicology and the Semantic Web, which ensures that the ideal skill sets are available for
creating an authoritative and reusable URI scheme. Utilising domain knowledge, data licensed
from trusted musicological scholarly catalogues and in accordance with the ‘Four Rules to Linked
Data’1 as recommended by data.gov.uk, the project envisages producing the definitive URIs for
musical composers, that are trustable as backed up by musicology scholars.
In addition to URI minting, the datasets from each data partner will need to be aligned to ensure
that composers from one dataset will match up with the same composers from another. This
matching should be capable of handling different formatting of names (composer disambiguation)
as well as input errors occurring when the data partners digitised their catalogues. A subset of this
co-reference alignment has been performed under the musicSpace project, and we propose for
this project that the existing alignments are exposed as linked data, and that the alignment work
be expanded to all composers within the data sets, by using an expanded version of our prototype
alignment tool created for musicSpace.
Develop a prototype with instructional step-by-step demonstration and documentation
During the musicSpace project and through engagement with musicologists at the University of
Southampton and the musicological community more broadly (including stakeholders identified at
Durham University and Royal Holloway) through musicSpace’s dissemination and demo activities,
it was apparent that a number of crucial research and education tools have yet to be developed.
The data required for these tools however is available, albeit in an unhelpful format. A prime
example of a cited teaching aide for HE musicology students was that of a timeline visualisation.
Currently the passage of time and influence of composers throughout history can only be
understood by time-consuming information-triage across the multiple online musicology
catalogues. If however linked data were available (paragraph 6) it would be possible to make use
of the popular open source timeline software Simile2 to better understand the temporal
relationship between composers. Students could then use the timeline as an entry point into the
multiple online musicology catalogues rather than themselves having to perform an exhaustive
search of each. A benefit to using a Linked Data approach here is that any other Linked Data
sources can be added to the same timelines, so that correlations between other historical events
and music can be shown on the timeline, providing additional context for end-users.
In order to directly unlock the benefits of the Linked Data to non-technical end-users, a Codex will
be created on top of the data that will allow musicologists to search for items of interest, and to
get links to all references to those items in the partner collections. For example, a user is
interested in the works of Beethoven, and searches the Codex. The search finds all Linked Data
Four Rules to Linked Data: http://data.gov.uk/wiki/Linked_Data
SIMILE: http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
12.
13.
14.
15.
2
that references Beethoven and offers links to all of the collections so that the user can quickly
explore the data from those providers. These links include the musicSpace data partners as well
as Linked Data publishers such as MusicBrainz, DBPedia and the BBC, allowing users to listen to
works through the BBC iPlayer, using their existing Linked Data output which includes classical
3
music performances on Radio 3. The Codex will also utilise the backlinks technology , developed
by the co-located enAKTing project, to automatically update the codex’s links to show all
catalogues that utilise our minted URIs, so that future uses of the URIs are exposed to users.
The project intends to produce the above prototype visualisations to meet the specific needs of
students of musicologists and by proxy their educators and lecturers. In addition it will also
provide rich documentation to allow future projects to make use of the underlying data that is
being exposed. Documentation will also be provided to demonstrate how third party datasets,
both currently known or not yet existing, can be joined with the published linked data to add
additional information or meaning. Video tutorials on how to find Linked Data on the web, and how
to explore it with the data we expose will be posted to YouTube and the project blog.
Explore and report on the opportunities and barriers in making content structured
It is anticipated that much will be learned through the alignment of multiple data sources and that
the tools generated to aide this technique will be useful for other research domains. The project
intends to regularly publish findings on the project blog specifically regarding the discovery of
similar resources within dissimilar non-structured datasets and how best to converge these into a
single canonical structured linked dataset.
More formalised discovery resulting from the efforts of the project will be deposited into the
School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton’s EPrints Open
Access online repository4.
One of the roles of the musicologist on this project is to highlight important sources within
musicology that can be further leveraged by conversion into Linked Data.
Engagement with the Community
16. To ensure that the way the URI resources are both published for use and made accessible for reuse by other tools and services, we will be working with stakeholders throughout the process for
regular review and updates of our approach. We have used this kind of development/evaluation
approach successfully with projects like musicSpace.
17. In the first instance, the project technical team will be working regularly throughout the lifecycle of
the project with our musicologist colleagues here at the University of Southampton. In particular
we will be running standard evaluation and development processes to refine both the Codex and
the Visualisation tools - the main outward-facing interfaces in the project.
18. At regular intervals, we will also be deploying beta prototypes of these services with our
distributed stakeholders from Durham University and Royal Holloway who are all on board to
participate in these trials. Their letters of support for the project are appended.
19. A workshop will also be held toward the end of the project to promote the use and uptake of the
linked data outputs of the project. The workshop will be suitable for musicologists as well as
computer scientists and cater for a range of abilities and range of familiarity with the semantic
web.
20. The aim of the workshop is to give tutorials of the use and reuse of the project outputs and
encourage the linking to minted URIs by publishers of existing linked data (we have liaised with
Yves Raimond at the BBC who publish a large amount of linked data including classical music
performances from BBC Radio 3, whom has expressed an interest in such a workshop). We have
contacted DevCSI who have agreed to aid us in engagement with the UKHE developer
community, and we have contacted the DCC who have agreed to aid us by linking to our
announcements for our proposed workshop.
21. We anticipate that the outcomes from the project will also continue to be of interest to various
research venues where we have published this kind of work in the past, such as the International
Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) and International Association of Music Libraries.
3
4
Backlinks: http://backlinks.psi.enakting.org/
EPrints: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk
3
Impact
22. Impact on Academic Researchers, Teachers and Learners - Linking, visualising and
exploring Musicology Linked Data (WP6 and WP7)
Both the codex and timeline visualisation offer additional ways to accelerate information discovery
and knowledge building. Based on our experience with the musicSpace project and our proposed
output here, key figures in musicology anticipate the projects benefits for researchers and
students alike (see supporting letters from Professor Katharine Ellis, Royal Holloway, University of
London; Michael Spitzer, President of the Society for Music Analysis, Durham University;
Professor Philip Olleson, President, The Royal Musical Association and Emeritus Professor of
Historical Musicology, University of Nottingham).
23. The outputs of MusicNet impact researchers by improving the workflow for musicology research,
proving a trusted codex of links to scholarly and commercial data sources where information on
specific composers can be located. A Linked Data timeline visualisation allows comparison
between musicology and historical events published as linked data. Minted URIs for composers
provide a single academic reference for related online materials, suitable for use in teaching
environments.
24. Impact for Data Holders and Data Service Providers of Data Alignment (WP1, WP3, WP5)
Our partners (Grove, RISM, the British Library, etc. see letters of support), who hold the main
musicology sources, will have links to their data exposed on our codex website. By aligning data
sources against the identifiers and attributes, MusicNet provides a rich representation of the
musicology space. Data Holders benefit because their data is immediately linked to other data
holders. An ongoing benefit to others is that they can openly associate with the URIs used here,
to enable linking to other academic and commercial data sources. In doing so, their visibility to
academic researchers and students is increased, because links to their data sources are
published as links through our minted URIs. Publishing of Linked Data allows more opportunities
to link to more kinds of related sources; the exposing of Linked Data from their sources provides a
representation of them in the Semantic Web, eventually meaning that their data can be browsed
along with data from other domains, for example allowing browsing of both Baroque Music with
Baroque Architecture.
25. Complementarity to other services:
26. Although the Library of Congress, for example, provides an authority service for names and items
that can be used in the creation of library metadata, it is a commercially run subscription service,
and so there is a price barrier to smaller organisations and individual creators of datasets. Many
data providers with which we have worked on the musicSpace project5, have voiced objections to
the naming schema used by the Library of Congress and other authority services, which typically
use initials followed by surname and therefore does not provide the end user with full name
information that may be available. Our proposal to use URIs to identify composers will mean that
data partners are no longer limited in how they represent names in their data sources, while still
being able to link to other sources that represent names differently. In addition, by including data
about name variants in different sources, MusicNet will also address the issue of compatibility
with legacy data. The findings from the NAMES project6 will be exploited to best present the name
variations in addition to the core linked data output.
27. Impact for Linked Data Creators (WP2, WP5 and WP8)
Publishers of linked data recognise the usefulness of authoritative identifiers, in order for their
data to be useful outside of its published context. For example Yves Raimond (Senior Software
Engineer, BBC) notes in his letter of support that they are currently required to use DBPedia and
MusicBrainz as identifiers in their music linked data output, and that while DBPedia provides URIs
for some composers, the coverage of composers is limited. Similarly, musicbrainz URIs confuse
performers and composers, leading to ambiguity when applied to Classical Music. These
problems have impacted the usefulness of the BBC's classical music linked data output. Each of
these problems are addressed by MusicNet’s minted URIs and the persistence of the service.
5
6
musicSpace Project: http://musicspace.mspace.fm/
NAMES project: http://names.mimas.ac.uk
4
Quality of Proposal and Robustness of Workplan
28. The project will build on the practices of the musicSpace project to ensure that milestones and
deliverables are met in a timely fashion. In addition to a rapid and iterative approach to
development, this project will also utilise co-design methodologies wherever appropriate.
Involving stakeholders at each incremental phase and from the early stages of development will
ensure that the outputs of the project meet the real user needs of our targeted community.
7
29. In accordance with JISC guidelines the project team liaised with OSS Watch at the bid-writing
stage to ensure an open dialogue is developed should the proposal be successful & to seek
advice regarding the proposal writing process. OSS Watch templates will be used to develop a
Governance Model for the project, to be published in Week 4, in order to define the scope of the
project for third parties.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
7
Table 1 Gantt chart showing work plan and target dates for deliverables
The project will be led by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at
Southampton. The project will begin with an initial project start-up face-to-face meeting with all
those taking part in the project. A similar team meeting will occur at monthly intervals to monitor
progress against objectives. Public versions of the minutes of these meetings will be published
on the project website. Financial reports will be supplied by ECS financial management, and a
Final Report will be produced at the end of the Project. There will be a final project closure
meeting. Each of the work packages will require formal review and sign-off meetings, and these
are spaced at monthly intervals. There will be weekly technical meetings of the core project staff.
At the final project meeting and at the regular stakeholder meetings, the project’s output will be
evaluated against the requirements of the stakeholders to ensure the outputs fulfil the user needs.
A total of four person-days have been allocated to engage in programme-level activities:
programme meetings, relevant special interest groups, communications and dissemination
activities and the e-Framework, and budget has been allocated to cover travel to these activities.
Time has been allocated in Work Package 7 for the organisation, promotion and running of a one
day workshop to promote the project outputs to the wider community. Tutorials given during the
workshop will be video recorded and published online.
Staff. ECS will retain a full-time senior researcher (ECS RF) to work on implementing the
systems, and two part-time senior researchers in ECS and Music respectively. Directly allocated
OSS Watch: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
4.1
staff are mc schraefel, the PI, Joe Lambert (ECS), Daniel Smith (ECS) and Dr David Bretherton
(Music).
Project plan. The project plan is laid out in the Gantt chart of Table 1.
Work package 1 Data Triage
In collaboration with musicologists decide on the key types to expose about Composers
Deliverable 1: Report
Work package 2 Composer Alignment Tool
Tools will need to be generated to automatically recognise composer matches between multiple
data sources. These tools should also allow for input from musicology experts to improve
matches by manual approval and creating patterns for common reoccurring errors.
The musicSpace project has laid the groundwork for this alignment by mapping each different
dataset to a common ontology created as part of the project in collaboration with musicology
experts.
Deliverable 1: Tools for alignment
Work package 3 URI Scheme
Following the data.gov.uk and cabinet office review guidelines for publishing, an appropriate and
sustainable URI scheme will be created.
Deliverable 1: URI Scheme
Deliverable 2: Justification for scheme
Work package 4 Perform Data Alignment
Using the tools developed in WP2 each of the available each data sources will be aligned
Deliverable 1: Data mappings between each of the data sources
Work package 5 Expose Linked Data
Using the scheme decided upon in WP3, URIs will be minted and structured linked data will be
published that represents musicology composers
Deliverable 1: Linked Data
Work package 6 Prototype Development
Once the linked data has been published a prototype timeline visualisation will be produced.
Deliverable 1: Simile timeline using linked data from WP3
Deliverable 2: Codex on top of linked data
Deliverable 3: Documentation demonstrating how the prototypes were achieved
Work package 7 Community Engagement
A one day workshop to encourage use and reuse of the project outputs (see paragraph 19).
Deliverable 1: Workshop review
Work package 8 Reports & Guidance
Important research discoveries will be disseminated to the wider community via the project
website, published deposits into the local EPrints repository as well as monthly posts to the
project blog.
For a detailed list of proposed published and blog outputs see Appendix A.
Technology, Standards and QA
44. All project outputs will be deposed into the e-Framework Knowledgebase, and/or the JISC
InnovationBase. A similar approach to that used in the musicSpace project will be used to ensure
that sound agile software engineering practices are used..The project will build upon existing
specifications and standards from W3C, JISC, and other projects. In particular, it is expected to
reference agreed standards such as RDF8 and follow guidelines from data.gov.uk. Accessibility of
Web-based systems and software will be ensured by conforming to the WC3 Web Accessibility
Initiative level Double-A.
8
http://www.w3.org/RDF
5
IPR position & sustainability issues
45. While the code will be made available under an appropriate open source agreement as used
within any educational establishment and in-line with JISC’s requirements, the IPR will also
remain with the University of Southampton thereby allowing Southampton to further exploit the IP.
46. Sustainability of the produced code is through ensuring other universities and JISC projects have
access to the code and documentation for the system, through BSD or MIT licences (the code
being published in Source Forge). Quality factors built in to the work packages will ensure
successful Open Source life through achievement of a good OSMM rating, community
engagement, and community stated need.
47. Project memory will be recorded at regular intervals through the publication of reports and blog
posts, which have been planned in WP8. A community infrastructure will be created during project
start up using Source Forge, in order to enable public facing source code releases, bug tracking
and mailing list to be used for community engagement.
48. All reports, tools, and code from the project will remain on the project server and the
sourceforgeSource Forge code repository for a minimum period of 2 years. As long term
management of the URIs for this project are important the hosting of the Linked Data will be
maintained by ECS central infrastructure.
6
Risk
49. Some of the major risk factors to a project such as this that integrates many areas are the loss of
key personnel and the possibility that the deliverables are not achievable.
Risk
P
(1-5)
S
(1-5)
Score
(P x S)
Action to Prevent/Manage Risk
Technical
(Incomplete
or
unavailable
prior work)
2
5
10
While service descriptions, designs, and implementations will
be repurposed from previous projects, it is possible that these
projects may be unable to provide the anticipated materials.
The risk will be managed by ensuring that these projects will
be exploited in such a way that unavailability from one or even
two of these projects will not prove fatal to the proposed
deliverables.
Uptake by
target user
communities
2
4
8
There is a risk that the target users will fail to engage with the
technology provided. We have minimised this risk by creating
a network of interested collaborators, and enlisting institutional
support. The proposed workshop also aims to mitigate this risk
by directly engaging the community.
Staffing
2
3
6
The team understands design principles and no one member
of the team has any vital piece of knowledge not understood by
the others. The design principles are based on techniques
used by the project team on previous successful projects. The
advantage of this approach is that we are relying on an
experienced existing team.
Project
Sustainability
2
2
4
To ensure project memory, source code will be hosted on
Source Forge, and minted URIs will be hosted by ECS
infrastructure indefinitely (see attached letter).
Acquiring
data from
partners
1
4
4
The risk of not acquiring data from partners is low as contracts
are already in place for musicSpace and the provision for the
extension of these already exists.
Table 2: Main risks to the successful completion of the project.
7
Budget
Directly incurred costs
Jun.10-Mar.11
Yr1
Personnel
Staff
Consultants
Equipment
Travel & subsistence
Other
Total incurred
April.11-June 11
Yr2
Total
FEC £
43,704
8,843
7,000
1,000
2,000
53,704
1,000
1,000
10,843
52,547
7,000
2,000
3,000
64,547
Yr1
4,212
18,651
22,863
Yr2
852
3,842
4,694
5,064
22,493
27,557
48,731
10,039
58,770
125,298
25,576
150,874
JISC contribution
Institutional contribution
81,444
43,854
16,624
8,952
98,068
52,806
JISC contribution %
65.0%
65.0%
65.0%
Directly allocated costs
Personnel
Institutional estate
Total allocated
Indirect costs
General services
Total FEC
8
Previous Experience of the Project Team
50. mc schraefel is a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Southampton. She has led a
number of JISC funded projects including the musicSpace project from which this proposal builds
upon. More recently she is a CI on the EPSRC funded EnAKTing project whose main concern is
the exposure of UK Government information as Linked Data.
51. Joe Lambert is a Research Fellow within the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia group at the
University of Southampton. He is the primary UI developer on the mSpace faceted browser and
has worked on the JISC funded Richtags project as well as the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC) funded musicSpace. He also worked on the JISC funded OpenPSI project,
where he worked with public sector data in SPARQL databases, producing a standalone
SPARQL version of the popular facetted browser; mSpace.
52. Daniel A. Smith is a Research Fellow; the primary developer on the mSpace server and has also
been lead developer on the JISC funded Richtags project and the JISC/AHRC/EPSRC funded
musicSpace. His doctoral thesis focused on the intelligent linking of remotely hosted linked data
resources in a process called ‘pivoting’. He is also a regular contributor to the wider Linked Data
research community, including engagement with the BBC.
53. David Bretherton is a Research Fellow with the Music department at the University of
Southampton. He has a doctorate in Musicology from Oxford University and has also been the
primary musicology consultant on the musicSpace project.
Appendix A Proposed Research Outputs
The following topics are proposed for the projects research outputs:
1. Week 4: Governance Model (Project Website)
Customise one of the OSS Watch template governance models (Defines scope of
project and decision making process)
2. Week 5: Welcome (blog)
3. Week 7: Report on what data should be exposed as Linked Data (EPrints)
4. Week 9: Summary of Report from week 7 (blog)
5. Week 13: Beta Source code of Alignment Tool (blog)
6. Week 15: Documentation for Alignment Tool (Project Website)
7. Week 17: Announce Documentation & Source Code Update (blog)
8. Week 19: URI Scheme with justifications (Project Website)
9. Week 21: URI Scheme Announcement (blog)
10. Week 21: RISM data mappings (blog)
11. Week 25: Grove data mappings (blog)
12. Week 25: Announce Workshop (blog)
13. Week 29: Copac data mappings (blog)
14. Week 29: Expose currently aligned data to public (blog)
15. Week 33: British Library Collection data mappings (blog)
16. Week 33: Report on Hosting Linked Data (EPrints)
Publish a report on sustainable hosting of linked data, describing our work with the
school web systems team on how to package linked data so that it can be hosted
and migrated across future systems upgrades.
17. Week 37: British Library Sound Archive data mappings (blog)
18. Week 37: Announce public beta of Codex (blog and website)
19. Week 41: Expose updated aligned data (blog)
20. Week 45: Announce final version of Codex (blog)
21. Week 45: Workshop review (blog)
22. Week 50: Final report & project documentation (EPrints)
Appendix B Supporting Letter(s)
SouttiHlfrf5t?in
School of Electronics
and Computer Science
JISC
Northavon House
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol, BSl6 l QD
l9 April 2010
To whom it may concern
lnformation Environment Proposal
for the School of Electronics and Computer Science to be
submitting the exposing digital content development proposal MusicNet under the
JISC lnformation Environment 2Ol0 Crant Funding call, April 2010 (Strand B).
I am very pleased
I confirm that the proposal has my full support and that
commitments to the project.
ECS
will meet its
Yours sincerely
ffi-@
Professor Harvery Ruff, FlnstP,FOSA,
FIEE
Professor of Computer Science and Head of School
School ofElectronics and Computer Science, Universiry ofSouthampton, Highfield Campus, Southampton sorT rar United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (o) z3 8 o1g 29og Fax: +44 (o)23 Bo59 6881 wwwecs.soton.ac.uk
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THE BRITISH LIBRARY
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
T +44 (O)87O 444 15oo
www.bl.uk
THE WORLD'S KNOWLEDCE
Dr mc schraefel
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of SouthamPton
Southampton SOrT rBJ
r4 April zoro
Dear Dr schraefel
This is to confirm the continued support of the RISM (UK) Trust for the work
of your research team. In particular, we are delighted to write in support of the
proposed'MusicNet' composer URI project.
RISM UK and Ireland is currently working with your research team on the
'musicSpace'project, and has already provided technical advice about our data
format and has made a substantial subset of our database available to you. W'e are
very happy to continu supporringyour work by permitting the datawe have
already supplied to the'musicSpace'project to be used for the'MusicNet'
,rrrd"r.ake to provide additional subsets of data as necessary. The
proj..t,
".rJ
estimated value of our in-kind contribution is zoo'
We undersrand rhar our dara, alongwith data from other sources, will be used to
as an
generate synonym lists for composers' names that will be published online
(web
open-access resource. \(/e understand that you will be exposing the URLs
of RISM UK and Ireland's caralogue records, and that the open access
"ddr.rr.r)
resource you are proposing to create will match these URLs to the comPoser
URIs that will be created
-We
as
Part of the'MusicNet'project'
wish you well in your application for research funding'
\4
LW
h:-4
rLtu
Richard Chesser
Chair, RISM (UK) Trust
T +++(o)2o74127529 F +++ (o)zo 74r2.775r
Mob +44 6)2266 9o6zt5 E richard.chesser@bl'uk
THE BRITISH LIBRARY
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
T +44 (O)87O 444 15OO
www.bl.uk
THE WORLD'S KNOWLEDGE
Dr mc schraefel
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton SOIT rBJ
r4 April zoro
Dear Dr schraefel
I am writing to express our interest in and enthusiastic supporr for your proposed
'MusicNet' project. The composer URls that you propose to create will likely
have a number short-term benefits to publishers of online music and musicology
content, and in the future Linked Data and Semantic Veb approaches will be of
tremendous value.
I
understand that this new project developed out rhe existing 'musicSpace'
project, which the British Library has already been pleased to support by allowing
you access to a substantial subset of data from our catalogue database. \7e are
h"PPy to continue supporting your research by permitting you to use the data we
have already supplied for this new project too, and we are also willing ro provide
additional datasets, where this is necessary ro address the new research issues
posed by the 'MusicNet' project. \7e understand that our dara, along with data
from other sources, will be used to generate synonym lists for composers' names
that will be published online as an open-access resource.
The'benefit in kind'value of our support for this project
region of Lz7o.
Yours sincerely
W
\---
Richard Chesser
Head ofMusic
T +44@)zo 74r27s29 F +44 (o)zo 74rz77sr
Mob +44 @)7766 9o6z15 E [email protected]
is estimated
to be in the