Reusable musical data for contextual usage – DOREMUS

Music is everywhere – played, recorded, broadcast, listened to, sold, given or rented. Files of recorded music are all over the web – stored, streamed, shared or sold. Yet nothing is harder today than finding the history of a musical piece, its composer, its cultural origins, its lyricists and influences, its covers and interpretations. Still, this knowledge exists and is described in detail in the information systems of several cultural and media institutions around the world.

The primary objective of the DOREMUS project is to provide common knowledge models (ontologies) and shared multilingual controlled vocabularies to cultural institutions, publishers and distributors, as well as to different communities of devotees. The project will develop methods to publish, share, connect, contextualize and update music catalogs on the web of data.

The project is based on the cataloging expertise of Radio France, the BnF, the Cité de la musique, and the collaborative project Discotheka of Meaning Engines, as well as on corpora of already existing models in the musical domain, such as FRBRoo. The extension and specialization of ontologies and the vocabularies that will result from this project will allow to describe pieces of traditional and classical music, as well as related musical events. They will also provide descriptions of the relations of these pieces to their authors, their cultural background, the events related to their creation, their interpretations, their social functions, the instruments, the genres, and so on and so forth, remaining all the way through within the context of the existing music cataloging traditions.

Descriptions of music are only useful if made available to an audience, as educational or cultural elements of society. They have to facilitate the process of programming music broadcast and scheduling musical events, suggesting new interpretations, or serving as a source of inspiration for new work.

Therefore, the second goal of the project is to construct a tool assisting the selection of pieces of music. This tool will be able to propose an original musical program to a specialized radio station, select pieces of music or particular interpretations in order to illustrate the biography of a given artist, provide examples of a genre or describe the cultural landscape of a given historical moment.

The audiences of Radio France, the BnF and the Cité de la musique are mixed. They vary from children forming their musical culture to educated music lovers, passing through curious users discovering the world of music through their cultural identity. The project disposes with rich resources to develop and provide services: archives of musical radio programs, archives of concerts, pieces of music selected for publishing, playlists.

The third objective of the project is to construct and validate educational tools that enable the deployment of standards, vocabularies and the underlying semantic web technologies in the cultural institutions. The consortium aims strongly at acquiring and disseminating skills and expertise with multiple publications at international conferences, a constant interaction with international work-groups working on and with these ontologies and vocabularies, discussions with Europeana, the Library of Congress, and the BBC, all three supporting this project.

Three PhD students will be working on the DOREMUS project. The produced results will be concrete and reusable, applied and distributed on an international level. Models and vocabularies describing musical pieces of work, datasets, methods and tools for dataset linking, recommendation systems, typology of use-cases and audiences for these tools, educational documents: this is a non-exhaustive list of the outcomes of this project, all of them to be published with open licenses.