Re: Call for maintainers - Musicbrainz RDFa markup

Hello,

On 09/05/2013 02:37 PM, Barry Norton wrote:
> By the way, the easiest way to work with the server is to use the VM but
> this hadn't been updated since last year. I have an up-to-date version
> for the Summer School and I'll bring it into the Museum next week.

The current virtual machine image is from august this year, which is 
fairly recent.  For those interested, start here [1].

[1] http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Server_Setup


And now that I'm responding anyway...

As someone who has worked on the RDFa in MusicBrainz I do think that 
solution is untenable.  The current implementation is too brittle, and 
the website changes so frequently that making sure the RDFa is still 
correct after each change seems like a considerable effort.

There are also a few things which I found difficult to express in RDFa, 
but perhaps that is just because I'm not that familiar with it.. for 
example:

   On the release page where a tracklist is shown there is a single 
table which contains the entire tracklist of the release (even if it 
spans multiple discs).

   At some point the discs were wrapped in a <div typeof="mo:Record" 
about="(tracklist/medium CURIE)">, which was invalid html so that <div> 
had to be removed.  And we want to keep these rows in a single table and 
in a single <tbody> so that their columns line up even when we don't 
specify widths for them, etc...

It is clash of trying to get the visual layout of the page correct AND 
the structure of the RDFa data embedded in it which makes working on 
this hard (at least it was for me :).

So I think a better long-term solution would be to have a separate 
codebase/project which takes the current musicbrainz webservice output 
and turns that into rdf.  I imagine the easiest way to do that would be 
to take the existing JSON webservice, write a @context for it and some 
transformations of the data, and use existing RDF libraries to do 
JSON-LD to RDF/XML conversion.

We could make that available under urls like 
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/45a663b5-b1cb-4a91-bff6-2bef7bbfdd76.rdf .

-- kuno / warp.

Received on Friday, 6 September 2013 19:16:27 UTC