Login | Register
Home

Some consensus about music-related URIs

Tue, 09/08/2009 - 18:50 — kurtjx

Wittgenstien argued in Tractatus that a perfectly logical language would need a one-to-one correspondence between names and things. In the semantic web world this concept is manifested in the Unique Resource Identifier or URI. Ideally, each thing would have one URI. However, in practice, people often create different URIs for the same thing usually because they are unaware of one another's work. The owl:sameAs concept provides an easy work-around for this problem, but for the sake of clean design and easing interoperability it's best to avoid duplicating URIs if possible.

Following a recent discussion on the Linking Open Data mailing list, there seems to be some consensus about what URIs for music artists, tracks, and releases should look like. In summary:

artist: http://musicbrainz.org/artist/<mbid> James Brown URI:
http://musicbrainz.org/artist/20ff3303-4fe2-4a47-a1b6-291e26aa3438
track: http://musicbrainz.org/track/<mbid> Cold Sweat URI:
http://musicbrainz.org/track/b5ba4eca-0dbd-484b-b391-1ef93b8b30b4
release: http://musicbrainz.org/release/<mbid> Get On the Good Foot (Album) URI:
http://musicbrainz.org/release/0d4bbf3a-45c9-4ae2-91d1-8574d3a02c3e

Note these URIs are based on the Musicbrainz service which provides open and free resource disambiguation for music metadata. There are several other sources of Musicbrainz-based URIs (i.e. dbtune.org/musicbrainz, zitgist.com) but there is now a general consensus that the original 'proper' Musicbrainz URIs should be used. If you find a particular resource that does not have a Musicbrainz ID you can take the time to create one or you can mint your own cool URIs.

As of this writing, the Musicbrainz URIs are not dereferenceable but they should be soon.