ANN: BBC Music Linked Data Goodness

Hi All,

As you may know, we launched the BBC Music Beta yesterday [1,2,3]. We'd like
to go over the Linked Data goodness that we have built into the site.

For every artist profile we have published, we have content-negotiated RDF:

rapper -o turtle 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234
rapper: Parsing URI
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234 with
parser rdfxml
rapper: Serializing with serializer turtle
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix mo: <http://purl.org/ontology/mo/> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix time: <http://www.w3.org/2006/time#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix timeline: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/timeline.owl#> .
@prefix event: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#> .

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234.rdf
>
    rdfs:label "Description of the artist Coldplay" .

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234#art
ist>
    a mo:MusicGroup;
    foaf:name "Coldplay";
    owl:sameAs <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Coldplay>;
    mo:image 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/images/artists/7col_in/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d
52ba2e14234.jpg>;
    mo:musicbrainz 
<http://musicbrainz.org/artist/cc197bad-dc9c-440d-a5b5-d52ba2e14234>;
    mo:homepage <http://www.coldplay.com/>;
    mo:fanpage <http://www.pleasureunit.com/coldplay/index.php>;
    mo:wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldplay>;
    mo:imdb <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1095892/>;
    mo:myspace <http://www.myspace.com/coldplay>;
    mo:member 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/18690715-59fa-4e4d-bcf3-8025cf1c23e0#art
ist>, 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/d156ceb2-fd90-4e82-baea-829bbdf1c127#art
ist>, 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/6953c4db-7214-4724-a140-e87550bde420#art
ist>, 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/98d1ec5a-dd97-4c0b-9c83-7928aac89bca#art
ist> .

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/18690715-59fa-4e4d-bcf3-8025cf1c23e0#art
ist>
    a mo:SoloMusicArtist;
    foaf:name "Guy Berryman" .

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/d156ceb2-fd90-4e82-baea-829bbdf1c127#art
ist>
    a mo:SoloMusicArtist;
    foaf:name "Jon Buckland" .

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/6953c4db-7214-4724-a140-e87550bde420#art
ist>
    a mo:SoloMusicArtist;
    foaf:name "Will Champion" .

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/98d1ec5a-dd97-4c0b-9c83-7928aac89bca#art
ist>
    a mo:SoloMusicArtist;
    foaf:name "Chris Martin" .

rapper: Parsing returned 23 triples

Our approach to publishing the site in a linked data manner is:
* each artist profile HTML document is published at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:gid, where :gid is the MusicBrainz
identifier 
* rdf is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:gid.rdf
* content-negotiation is configured for
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:gid
* The http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:gid.rdf URI describes the document
* The http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:gid.rdf#artist URI describes the
artist

We¹ve considered various LOD publishing recipes, and decided to take this
approach as it was:
* simple: one view for the HTML, one view for the RDF
* suited our internal caching policy, as we could cache all representations

However, we¹ve found some curious issues with our internal BBC proxy, which
has randomly cached the RDF version and served that when a web browser was
expecting the HTML page. We believe we¹ve got around this by setting the
³Vary: Accept² [5] in the HTTP headers. We¹re curious to know if anyone else
has encountered this issue, as we had trouble finding any Linked Data
documentation on the subject.

It¹s been suggested that we use foaf:member and foaf:homepage instead of
mo:member and mo:homepage, so we will very likely make this change shortly.

We¹d like to publish the play count data you can see on the pages as RDF,
and we¹re looking for approaches on how to do this. Yves Raimond¹s playcount
ontology [6] looks like a great start, but please get in touch if you have
any ideas on how to do it.

Finally, we¹re providing owl:sameAs relations to DBPedia to artists profiles
if they have an English Wikipedia link.

We¹d really appreciate feedback on what we¹re doing, so please get in touch
if you have any ideas or requests!

Patrick Sinclair and Nicholas Humfrey

[1] 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/07/bbc_music_artist_pages_beta.h
tml
[2] 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/07/interesting_stuff_the_all_new
.html
[3] 
http://derivadow.com/2008/07/28/the-all-new-bbc-music-site-where-programmes-
meet-music-and-the-semantic-web/
[4] http://musicbrainz.org
[5] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_headers.html
[6] http://purl.org/ontology/playcount/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/
This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.