Who did what where when?

Web 3.0 is about computers talking our language – about knowing what we’re talking about, and what we’re trying to say. musicDNA is ready for this online paradigm shift because its index of musical subjects – composers, works, bands, albums, gigs, listeners – uses persistent subject identifiers, and because it captures the relationships between those subjects within an ontology – a conceptual reference model – that is flexible, robust, and most significantly, maps to the way we think.

A framework for our shared musical knowledge

musicDNA is the name for both an ontology and a number of user interface concepts which together provide a dynamic navigation architecture for the mapping of the musical universe. musicDNA captures the essential structure of musical events and resources in terms of human activity, thereby enabling visualization of, and navigation through, this powerfully rich semantic space, for use in many kinds of commercial, educational, and community-based environments. musicDNA opens up a new way of creating social objects from music, musicians, and music-making, mapping the journey of a piece of music across four stages from inspiration via notation and interpretation to appreciation, and enabling the tracking of musical influences across time. musicDNA is provided by joint partners Pensive SA and CTU, and is implemented using the Topic Maps data model. The musicDNA project and ontology have been presented repeatedly in the international research community since 2008, and have a long history dating back to a BBC programme at the turn of the Millennium; the current phase was publicly announced by Pensive in early 2009.

“musicDNA accelerates the trend towards users having greater management of social objects in digital space” said Peter Brown, Managing Director of Pensive. Antony Pitts of CTU said, “musicDNA is about describing the musical universe in such a way that both people and computers can connect up the information we have with actual musical resources: recordings, sheet music, comment and recommendation”

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The iPhone / iPod touch app musicGPS is in the iTunes store and already enables users to geotag their listening history and navigate via an interactive timeline. Allowing users to join up their data to the musicDNA index will unlock any number of potential contextual links within a personalized interface.