Antony Pitts's blog - Hyperion Records & musicDNA

Hyperion Records & musicDNA

Posted: Wednesday 3 February 2010 - 0 comment(s) [ Comment ] - 0 trackback(s) [ Trackback ]

download full Hyperion Records & musicDNA press release

Semantically sticky

Hyperion Records is the first classical label to open up its data to musicDNA. The Hyperion catalogue is a very valuable source of information about music – thousands and thousands of musicians, pieces of music, and recordings. musicDNA is about sharing expert musical knowledge, about joining up musical data so that people and computers are both speaking the same language. That means, instead of googling for ambiguous phrases, and navigating around flat wiki-pages, we’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation. You, me, and the rest of the internet. Hyperion recognizes the true value potential in making their data “semantically sticky” so that we’ll all be able to talk about it – when the full musicDNA service is launched later this year.

Read my psi

musicDNA is made up of an index of musical subjects each with a published subject identifier (PSI) – composers, works, bands, albums, gigs, listeners – and an ontology* or map of the relationships between them. It means that when you talk about George Gershwin on your blog or listen to George Gershwin on your iPad, you’ll be able to let musicDNA know you’re talking about the same George Gershwin as in Hyperion’s wide-ranging catalogue – and you’ll be able to join up details of your music-making directly with that of your influences and musical heroes. If you’re a musician, that means you’ll be giving people lots of new access points to your music. If you’re a music-lover, you’ll be discovering more about what you already like as well as music that’s new to you. If you’re an organization like Hyperion, you’ll be establishing a keystone position in the evolving digital eco-system. That’s what Web 3.0 is all about. And musicDNA is ready for it. Are you?

Director of Hyperion, Simon Perry, said: “The classical community finally has a real music information source that operates outside the pop-driven data parameters imposed by almost all other online systems.”

musicDNA’s John Drinkwater said: “Hyperion’s data is authoritative, detailed, and ideal as a foundation for our shared knowledge of music in the classical sphere.”

Notes to Editors

who does what where when

Hyperion Records – “Britain’s brightest record label” – is an independent British classical label which was founded in 1980 and is devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Hyperion’s pioneering music-download site is at: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk.

musicDNATM 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 in the international research community since 2008, and have a long history dating back to a BBC programme in 1999/2000. The musicDNA website is at: http://www.musicdna.info/.

*ontology – a Web 3.0 buzzword: http://www.wiziq.com/tutorial/86-Moving-from-WEB2-0-to-WEB-3-0

contact details

please see press release pdf for contact details

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