Open Music Observatory | Antal Dániel honlapja

Open Access Music Dataspaces – Open Music Observatory

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:00:00 +0100

Panel topics
How does music shape the social and cultural fabric of Europe? What can patterns of music consumption reveal about policies, inclusion, and everyday life? Music is not only a mirror of culture, but also a living indicator of how communities evolve and interact. Today, the growing availability of music-related data opens new perspectives to understand the social value of music and its potential to build fairer and more sustainable ecosystems. When used responsibly, data can help policymakers, researchers, and professionals identify gaps, measure impact, and support better decision-making. By turning open data into collective knowledge, projects like OpenMusE aim to bring more transparency, visibility, and fairness to Europe’s music landscape, bridging analysis, policy, and creativity. Can data really become a common good for music? And how can openness drive the next phase of Europe’s cultural development?

The presentation introduces the Open Music Observatory (OMO), a federated, open-data infrastructure designed to repair long-standing metadata gaps in Europe’s music ecosystem. Building on the vision set by the feasibility study for the European Music Observatory, we show how fragmented, hidden, restricted, and unharmonised data can be aligned through shared standards and collaborative curation. Using Slovakia as a pilot case, we demonstrate how public and private stakeholders can jointly improve the visibility of national repertoire, reduce metadata errors that cause lost royalties, and strengthen cultural diversity in streaming and discovery systems.

We will present the OMO federation model, its Slovak deployment (SK Music Dataspace), and the ways institutions and developers can interact with the system: manual curation via Wikibase interfaces, automated ingestion through APIs, and compliant AI access through the Model Context Protocol. The talk highlights how interoperable data supports fairer recommendation systems, better attribution, improved royalty flows, and new research possibilities—illustrating how open, ethical data infrastructures can help smaller repertoires thrive in a globalised digital marketplace.

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:45:00 +0200

How can music library services be modernized to compete with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music Classical? How can we make it easy for music students, educators, amateurs, or professional musicians to find the sheet music of a piece that interests them? And how can schoolchildren explore the music of their town or region—with the help of local musicians, teachers, or librarians—given the limited financial resources of university and public libraries worldwide?

Our tools are open-source and free to test, and we are happy to support those interested in exploring them. We are also planning a meetup in Budapest at the end of August or beginning of September to discuss these ideas further with IAML Hungary members.

🇭🇺 Olvasd magyarul el ezt a bejegyzést - Hungarian version of this post.

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex, originally presented at the IAML 2025 Congress alongside librarian Anna Mester and Anna Žilková, head of IAML Slovakia. Their presentation and poster explored the legal, organizational, and information science aspects of the data-sharing infrastructure behind the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb). A year earlier, the Hungarian professional community encountered this work at the Networkshop 2024: Digital Transformation of Education, Research, and Public Collections conference, in the talk and paper titled A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei [Opportunities for Federating the Slovak Data Exchange Space in Hungary].

At the IAML Congress, we invited international partners to test, critique, and help develop a live demo service. Thanks to Salzburg’s geographical and cultural proximity, we were joined by many Hungarian colleagues.

The Reprex team is explaining our collaborative work to music metadata experts in Salzburg. Photo: Anna Žilková.

Our project’s ambitious goal is to make all music created within the territory of present-day Slovakia accessible through a semantic database. This includes a user-friendly graphical interface for individuals and API access for libraries and other institutions. The database connects known works and their variants, manuscript and published scores, and demo, archival, and commercial recordings. It also links composers and performers to secondary sources in libraries and archives that provide musicological context.

In Slovakia, we are integrating materials from the Music Fund, the Slovak Music Centre, and the SOZA database (sister organization to Artisjus). This enables us to substantially improve the data quality of public music library catalogues, which often lack detailed, work-level descriptions of scores. Metadata is frequently incomplete, outdated, or even incorrect. For example, a catalogue may refer to a composer’s “collected works” or “selected sonatas,” but rarely indicate which edition contains a particular sonata or movement a listener may have just encountered on a streaming playlist.

Our poster presented by Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Žilková (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 on IAML 2025. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Our Salzburg presentation explored key questions:

How does data governance work between private and public organizations—such as between a rights management society or streaming platform and a university or public library?
How can we reduce redundant workflows through data exchange?
How can deeper, semantically enriched search improve music library services?
What transferable insights from information and library science can help libraries, archives, museums, and private actors mutually improve their data?
The development of this system is supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, through the Open Music Europe project. Our aim is to offer a federated, decentralized alternative to the centralized but never built European Music Observatory model—one that builds on existing national, regional, and pan-European data systems in a networked way and leaves data ownership and control in place following the subsidiarity principle.

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

If you care about interoperability, cultural equity, and the future of library relevance in the streaming era—this is your moment to get involved.

Missed IAML2025?
👉 Presentation
👉 Poster
👉 Please contact us directly to try out our system.
👉 Blogpost about the wider context of our work, relevant for IAML, not only national chapters and invidivual members.

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0200

16:00–17:30 Our presentation takes place in the session of Music Libraries of Tomorrow: Reaching out to Wider Audiences at the Mozarteum University E.001 HS Thomas Bernhard room.

We want invite IAML members—national libraries, regional centres, municipal collections, and independent music librarians—to join us in building a federated, decentralised European Music Observatory. 👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Our presentation at IAML 2025 introduces the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb), a national pilot within Open Music Europe. It offers a pragmatic, scalable solution to a widespread challenge: aligning metadata from libraries, archives, rights organisations, and digital distributors without centralisation or heavy infrastructure.

Built on the European Interoperability Framework, SKCMDb creates a legal, semantic, and organisational bridge between institutions like the Slovak Music Centre, SOZA, and public libraries, while also integrating with global platforms like Wikidata and MusicBrainz. We show how library records, music rights data, and streaming metadata can be reused and enriched across systems—supporting discoverability, legal compliance (like local content quotas), and better access to Slovak music.

This presentation will be especially valuable for professionals working in metadata curation, authority control, and digital service design, and those seeking low-cost, high-impact pathways to public-private interoperability in cultural heritage.

Please visit our poster and talk with our team members, Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Zilkova (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 10:30–11:00 in the Gallery. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Check out the entry examples related to Albrecht’s: Missa in C (printed, Hudobné centrum) with library and webshop access points, and linked data on the composition itself Q479, linked to its recorded manifestations.

Next steps

The Slovak pilot illustrates how libraries and national music centres can take a central role in a decentralised European Music Observatory that federates with the EU Open Data Portal, Europeana, ECCCH, DARIAH, and Zenodo. This poster accompanies a companion contribution on the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, including the LīvMDb (Livonian Music Database), which explores how smaller regional repertoires can be embedded in broader, multimodal cultural graphs—advancing the vision of a European Music Observatory as a complement to the European Cultural Heritage Cloud.

Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:45:00 +0200

Across Europe, music libraries are under pressure: greater expectations for digital services, growing metadata burdens, and increasingly fragmented infrastructure. At the same time, vital parts of our musical heritage—especially regional or minority repertoires—remain hidden from search, discovery, and policy.

Please meet us at 👉 IAML2025 in Salzburg on 7 or 8th July. Our presentation takes place in the session of Music Libraries of Tomorrow: Reaching out to Wider Audiences at the Mozarteum University E.001 HS Thomas Bernhard room on 7 July 2025, 16:00–17:30. The day after you can meet us in the Gallery for the poster session.

We initiated the Open Music Europe project, because we believe that in the music ecosystem, data centralisation always fails, and a new kind of cooperation is needed—one that respects local control while enabling international reuse.

Our Slovak pilot, the SKCMDb, connects libraries, music centres, rights organisations, and platforms through a shared metadata backbone based on open ontologies. Built as a national data sharing space, it enables coordinated cataloguing and discovery across public and private systems—from streaming services and printed scores to CD loans and digital archives.

But we also know that cultural and music policy is not only national. It is often regional, local, or community-based. That’s why we follow the principle of subsidiarity: letting decisions and innovation happen at the lowest competent level, close to the collections and communities themselves.

Our Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, including the LīvMDb (Livonian Music Database), shows how even the smallest communities—without formal cultural infrastructure—can take part in high-quality metadata production and digital discovery. We provide the tools and models to empower local custodians, in their language, on their terms, and without the need for large institutional support.

Please check out the demo version of the Finno-Ugric Dataspace or read the long-form project description.

Now we invite IAML members—national libraries, regional centres, municipal collections, and independent music librarians—to join us in building a federated, decentralised European Music Observatory. One that reflects Europe’s diversity. One that reduces data curation costs and improves visibility. One that connects music libraries with the open data and open science infrastructures already transforming other sectors.

Our platform is open-source, built on FAIR principles and the European Interoperability Framework. We use tools like Wikibase, Blazegraph, Sampo-UI, and R—packaged to work for libraries with limited technical capacity.

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

If you care about interoperability, cultural equity, and the future of library relevance in the streaming era—this is your moment to get involved.

Not present at IAML2025?
👉 Presentation
👉 Poster
👉 Please contact us directly.

Let’s ensure music libraries remain vital entry points to Europe’s rich and evolving cultural soundscape.

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:30:00 +0100

Today, most music is recommended by algorithms—not only to subscribers of platforms like YouTube and Spotify, but also to radio editors, concert promoters, and festival organisers. This shift has led to the conclusion that collective management organisations (CMOs) and music information centres (MICs) must modernise their metadata and publishing practices to remain visible and competitive in the digital age.

Using advanced data enrichment techniques, our platform helps ensure that these institutions have the most accurate, 360° view of the repertoire they represent. We also ensure that digital streaming services and search engines are updated with precise, reliable, and machine-readable musical metadata.

See our presentation made in the IAMIC 2024 conference in Vienna:

Our goal is to ensure that MICs and CMOs maintain the most up-to-date information about musical works. Whenever data is missing or outdated, we retrieve it from authoritative sources and deliver it automatically into their systems—ready for review by human curators.

We aim to make all music in Slovakia visible across global music discovery platforms, encyclopaedias, Europeana, and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. This includes helping users locate sheet music for sale or loan, as well as showing where each piece can be heard—whether via streaming, radio, or public archives.

To achieve this, we provide:

We want to ensure that a MICs and CMOs have the most accurate information about music. Whenever data is missing or new information has yet to reach their database, we try to look up the data from reliable sources and ensure that it arrives automatically in their system (to be reviewed by a knowledgeable human curator).
Make all music in Slovakia visible on all global music systems, encyclopaedia, Europeana and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. Enable people to locate sheets of works for sale or public lending and show where people can listen to the music in various formats.
Provide the information in a dual format: enable a MIC to provide machine-readable, standardised, RDF annotated data to directly support the recommender systems of Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and other platforms.
Provide CMOs with a framework to make their members more visible to digital streaming platforms by enrichment, control and processing of available metadata and to also inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content, thus promoting local CMO members.

Read more or take a look at our conference poster below:

Download the poster in pdf

SKCMDb

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:16:00 +0100

Early Data Access

Wikibase Interfaces

In machine-readable TTL format: https://reprexbase.eu/skcmdb/Special:EntityData/Q485.ttl In XML or JSON, JSON-LD, N-Triples.

SPARQL Endpoint

http://135.181.91.51:3030/#/dataset/skcmdb/query; requires password.

Sampo Semantic Browser

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

Next steps

Project History

Download our feasibility study from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6427514.

In 2020, we studied the effect of increasingly AI-driven streaming platforms on the Slovak music repertoire. We realised that music is being recommended by algorithms, not only to YouTube or Spotify subscribers but also to radio editors, concert promoters, and festival organisers. We realised that rights management organisations (CMOs), music information centres (MICs), and music libraries, archives, and documentation centres (MLs) must change their practices to remain competitive and visible.

In the Open Music Europe project¹, we are building a data infrastructure that aims to coordinate music knowledge (in our demonstration example, Slovak music) stored in various institutional silos and systems. We wanted to “plug in” the database of the MIC Slovak Music Centre (MCS) into a global data system like Wikipedia or Spotify and, at the same time, connect it with the Slovak CMO SOZA, the Slovak National Library and the music section of the ML Bratislava City Library. A data science company, Reprex, oversees this process.

We want to ensure that a MICs and CMOs have the most accurate information about music. Whenever data is missing or new information has yet to reach their database, we try to look up the data from reliable sources and ensure that it arrives automatically in their system (to be reviewed by a knowledgeable human curator).
Make all music in Slovakia visible on all global music systems, encyclopaedia, Europeana and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. Enable people to locate sheets of works for sale or public lending and show where people can listen to the music in various formats.
Provide the information in a dual format: enable a MIC to provide machine-readable, standardised, RDF annotated data to directly support the recommender systems of Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and other platforms.
Provide CMOs with a framework to make their members more visible to digital streaming platforms by enrichment, control and processing of available metadata and to also inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content, thus promoting local CMO members.

As seen from the points made above, this data infrastructure is beneficial to a great degree for all the parties involved.

European Interoperability Framework for Music

Nowadays most data is downloaded and used by intelligent software agents on various digital services and platforms. To meet the modern service requirements of 2025, we needed to implement an enhanced implementation of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) that extends to privately held data. We need to communicate information and metadata about Slovak music in a way that musicologists, musicians and their managers, copyright law practitioners, citizen scientists as well as software agents understand worldwide.

The EIF is a four-layered specification for how to create world-class digital public services. In music, however, the private sector is vital, too. CISAC’s members, the CMOs that register new works, are private parties. To add weight, digital streaming platforms ingest more metadata about music in a week than Europeana Sound over ten years.

On the European Interoperability Framework see: (European Commission 2017).

To ensure legal and organisational interoperability, the members of the Open Music Consortium (SOZA–Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society, MCS, Reprex) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Slovak Ministry of Culture; later, MCS, SOZA and Reprex signed a more technical MoU with the Slovak National Library².

The aim at the legal level was to understand the different rules of business and statistical confidentiality, as well as data protection rules in general. Harmonising the GDPR across a public information body like MCS and a private entity like SOZA is particularly challenging.
On the organisational level, we must ensure that different organisations (MCS, SOZA and the national library) understand each other’s data and workflows, for example, in identifying a musical work or a musical group with no legal personality.
On the semantic level, we must ensure that the databases of MCS, SOZA, and the national library understand each other.
The technical level must ensure that harmonised workflows result in successful data exchanges, given the legal constraints and semantic definitions.

In our system design, we followed two important new European initiatives. In connecting cultural data, European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCH), and the Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory. Concerning connecting authoritative data across governmental and private systems, we adhere to the novel European data governance regulations³.

A data (sharing) space is a system that integrates data whenever it is needed, or is permitted, with some labour-intensive aspects of data integration postponed until it is possible to carry them out. In a data sharing space, like Reprex’s Motion Picture Dataspace, we know where the data is in each organisation, we know its format, documentation standards, even known problems and issues. But we only load them into an application, for example, an application that calculates environmental effects or GHG emissions when it is needed and permitted. Our dataspace reduces the work in such scenarios by by setting up automatic matching and mapping generation techniques⁴.

Wikibase is the software that runs the worlds largest open knowledge graph database, Wikidata, which synchronises knowledge with about 330 (different language) Wikipedias and countless national libraries, music services, and other data sources. Our dataspace is powered by an extended and configured Wikibase system. Wikibase has often been used for authority control; it is also the system of the EU Knowledge Graph⁵.

The most notorious problem plaguing digital services and databases is the unresolved issue of named entity disambiguation. With digital services providing access to over 100 million recordings, we often find dozens of artists or works with the same title. Named-entity ambiguity is confusing for humans and for autonomous AI systems, too.

Our system focuses on harmonising the registration processes of various knowledge organisations, such as libraries and CMOs. We want to ensure that every artist, music group and the manifestation of their work in music recordings and sheets receive a globally unique and persistent identifier. We want to provide new recordings and sheets in at least one public library with a globally used VIAF (and, when applicable, an ISNI) identifier. To support named-entity disambiguation going back to hundreds of years of music creations and events diaries, we are developing trustworthy AI systems that remain strictly under human control in line with the new requirements of the EU’s AI Actt⁶.

Disseminating information

Returning to our Feasibility study, we realised that about half of the music streams had data problems. They resulted in late or missed royalty payments. We also realised that almost a fifth of the Slovak repertoire had such low-quality metadata that music recommender systems could not make sense of what their recordings work. We are changing this situation. We want to ensure that we realise if the “Internet knows” misleading information about a work or recording. Using modern data-enriching techniques, we ensure that the MCS and SOZA have the most accurate 360° views of the repertoire they represent. By data dissemination, we also guarantee that digital streaming services and search engines are informed about precise and up-to-date knowledge.

We carry out health checks on the metadata of artists and labels and highlight missing, potentially misleading, or erroneous information.
Utilising Wikidata and Wikipedia, we disseminate the correct information to streaming services and search engines (which rely on knowledge graph technologies and regularly crawl Wikidata.) We are hosting a Wikipedian in Residence to find better cooperation with the Wikipedian community and the curator community of Wikidata.
We are building the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb) that will inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content (legally stipulated) broadcasting quota, where orchestras can find for purchase or public lending scores of works or where professional and enthusiast audiences find any music ever made in Slovakia.
We are designing a new digital distribution model for non-profits and self-releasing artists who need help receiving professional service due to the low commercial value of their culturally valuable works.
We are also experimenting with data bias checks to find out about potential algorithmic biases that work against the Slovak repertoire.

Our Demo

Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (working demo)

Context: Open Music Observatory

You can read the long-form documentation of our plans here.

Our ambition with the development of the Open Music Observatory is to provide the technological basis and a practical roadmap for creating a European Music Observatory in a bottom-up, decentralised way. Instead of waiting for a grand, central agreement on what should a European music observatory be collecting and who should control it, we suggest a pragmatic approach: allow any data owners and collectors who satisfy certain quality and cooperation rules to add their data to an Open Music Observatory; when it reaches a sufficient maturity for use in Europe, then decide if its maintenance requires a new institutional form or not. You can read or regularly updated progress report on this work here.

Creating the Open Music Observatory is a cornerstone task of the Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems (Open Music Europe 2023) Horizon Europe research and innovation project. This task is running till the end of the project (31 December 2025) with the collection, processing, and dissemination of more data and providing innovative, new data services in line with our exploitation pathways. This report is an accompanying document for the creation of Open Music Observatory as a digital infrastructure on the World Wide Web.

The Open Music Observatory is a digital service provider for the music industry that follows the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) definition for such services with a unique governance model. The governance model and the digital service infrastructure represent a unique innovation that considers many good examples from the European Union and other industries.

An observatory has traditionally been a permanent location for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. In the past 30 years, it has also been used for long-term digital data collection programs for markets, social sciences, and humanities. Our milestone requires the start of this observatory after a lengthy and intensive planning and prototyping phase. It can be seen as a modern reimagination of the data observatory model, or the observatory 2.0. We created a new observatory model that fully aligns with the European Interoperability Framework but extends the governance of the digital services beyond public bodies, and allows the creation of a public-private partnership to manage the observatory.

We were informed and influenced by the creation of Europeana (which started out from a similar collaborative project) and their new plans to extend their digital services into the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). We aim fully interoperability with Europeana and ECCCH, but we also bring a new element into their thinking. While they are mainly aggregating the work of public sector memory institutions, we are building a governance model that allows a more successful cooperation among the private sector and the public music sector.

By the end of 2025, we aim to create an “observatory 3.0”, which already hosts many intelligent data improvement technologies and fuels innovative applications/services in line with our project’s exploitation pathways. These services are at different maturity levels, but they could not be brought to a testable MVP without building out the minimal digital infrastructure and governance model at this milestone.

References

Antal, Dániel. 2020. ‘Feasibility Study on Promoting Slovak Music in Slovakia & Abroad’. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6427514.

Antal, Dániel, Michal Grochal, and Christos Varvantakis. 2024. ‘Building a Music Data Sharing Space with Wikibase’. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8046977.

Antal, Dániel, Ádám Lázár, and Andor Kornél Barát. 2024. ‘Open Music Observatory. Progress Report’. Digital Music Observatory. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11564114.

Bianchini, Carlo, Stefano Bargioni, and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo. 2021. ‘Beyond VIAF Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries’. Information Technology and Libraries 40 (2). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v40i2.12959.

BVDA. 2023. ‘Data Sharing Spaces and Interoperability’. Edited by Antonio Kung (Trialog), Ray Walshe (DCU), and Rigo Wenning (ERCIM). BVDA.

Curry, Edward. 2020. ‘Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques’. In Real-Time Linked Dataspaces: Enabling Data Ecosystems for Intelligent Systems, 45–62. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29665-0_3.

D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Strong Ideas. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/.

Diefenbach, Dennis, Max de Wilde, and Samantha Alipio. 2021. ‘[Wikibase as an Infrastructure for Knowledge Graphs: the EU Knowledge Graph]{.nocase}’. In ISWC 2021, 12922:631–47. Online, France: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88361-4\37.

Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission), Pere Brunet, Livio De Luca, Eero Hyvönen, Adeline Joffres, Peter Plassmeyer, Martijn Pronk, Roberto Scopigno, and Gábor Sonkoly. 2022. [Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage: ex – ante impact assessment]{.nocase}. LU: Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/64014.

ESS. 2017. ‘Position Paper on Access to Privately Held Data Which Are of Public Interest’. European Statistical System. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/13019146/13346094/ESS+Position+Paper+on+Access+to+privately+held+data+final+-+Nov+2017.pdf/6ef6398f-6580-4731-86ab-9d9d015d15ae?t=1511447619000.

———. 2022. Privately Held Data Communication Toolkit. 2022nd ed. Manuals and guidelines. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

EU 2019/1024 Open Data Directive. 2019. Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on Open Data and the Re-Use of Public Sector Information. Official Journal of the European Union. Vol. OJ L. http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/1024/oj.

EU 2022/868 Data Governance Act. 2022. ‘[Regulation (EU) 2022/868 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2022 on European data governance and amending Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 (Data Governance Act) (Text with EEA relevance)]{.nocase}’. EUR-Lex. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/868/oj.

EU 2024/1689 Artificial Intelligence Act. 2024. ‘[Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act)]{.nocase}’. OJ OJ L 2024/1689 (July): 1–144. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj.

European Commission. 2017. ‘European Interoperability Framework – Implementation Strategy. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament the Council the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions’. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52017DC0134.

European Commission, and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. 2019. Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2759/346720.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, M Clarke, P Vroonhof, J Snijders, A Le Gall, B Jacquemet, et al. 2020. Feasibility Study for the Establishment of a European Music Observatory : Final Report. Publications Office. https://doi.org/doi/10.2766/9691.

Fagerving, Alicia. 2023. ‘Wikidata for Authority Control: Sharing Museum Knowledge with the World’. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications 5 (1): 222–39. https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.10665.

Hudobné centrum, Reprex B.V., and Slovenská národná knižnica, and Slovenský ochranný zväz autorský. 2024. ‘Memorandum o porozumení vo vzťahu k Slovenskej súhrnnej hudobnej databáze]’.

Ministerstvo kultúry SR, and Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘Memorandum o porozumení o využití výsledkov analýz otvorených politík v kontexte slovenského kultúrneho a kreatívneho priemyslu a sektorových verejných politík v spolupráci s konzorciom pre výskum a inovácie s názvom OpenMuse. $$Memorandum of Understanding on utilizing the Open Policy Analysis results of the OpenMuse Research and Innovation Consortium in the context of Slovak cultural and creative industries and sectors’ public policies$$’. https://www.crz.gov.sk/zmluva/7645338/.

Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘[Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems]{.nocase}’. https://doi.org/10.3030/101095295.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe, research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement No. 101095295 (Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems (Open Music Europe 2023)). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. ↩︎
See the references (Ministerstvo kultúry SR and Open Music Europe 2023; Hudobné centrum et al. 2024) ↩︎
See on the ECCH (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission) et al. 2022) and the European Music Observatory (European Commission et al. 2020); on connecting the (public) European Statistical System with privately-held data: (ESS 2017, 2022); and as a general legal framework the Open Data Directive and the Data Governance Act (EU 2019/1024 Open Data Directive 2019; EU 2022/868 Data Governance Act 2022). ↩︎
You can read more in less technical language about this approach in Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques (Curry 2020), and in a more technical specification in Data Sharing Spaces And Interoperability (BVDA 2023). Reprex is an affiliated member of the Big Data Value Association (BVDA). ↩︎
The knowledge graph of the European Union: (Diefenbach, Wilde, and Alipio 2021); use for cultural authority control: (Bianchini, Bargioni, and Pellizzari di San Girolamo 2021; Fagerving 2023). Our solution: (Antal, Grochal, and Varvantakis 2024). ↩︎
Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI (European Commission and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology 2019); Artificial Intelligence Act (EU 2024/1689 Artificial Intelligence Act 2024). We were greatly informed by Data feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020) on the intersectional escalation of data biases that leads to disadvantages to women, small countries, or independent repertoires. ↩︎

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 (#WMCEE) is an annual conference centered on Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia and other related projects) in countries of Central and Eastern Europe (more recently, also in Central Asia). It features presentations on Wikimedia projects, other wikis, free/open source software, free knowledge and free content, and these topics’ social and technical aspects.

Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

This presentation will be made in the Hungarian language. A similar presentation in English is available here.

Vajon miért nem ajánl a Spotify híres ajánlórendszere Szlovákiában szlovák embereknek elég szlovák zenét? És miért akadoznak az egyébként is nem kielégítő számú meghallgatások után a kifizetések? Ezek voltak azok a kérdések, amelyekre a Szlovák Művészeti Tanács kis összegű ösztöndíjával, a state51 támogatásával a Reprex és a SOZA válaszokat kezdett keresni 2020-ban. Azok az adatproblémák, amelyek a nem kielégítő eredményekre vezetnek, nem csak Szlovákiában, hanem lényegében minden kisebb nyelvterületen jelen vannak.

A Szlovák Zenei Adattér egy Horizon Europe programban finanszírozott mintaprojekt, amelyben különböző közgyűjteményi és magán jogkezelői adatok és metaadatok összekapcsolására kerül sor. Az adatkapcsolás jogi, szervezési és szemantikai megoldásai a zenei területtől függetlenül hasznosíthatók különböző jogi státuszú könyvtári-, levéltári-, múzeumi és magán adatbázisok összekapcsolására.

Az előadás célja kettős volt: egyrészt szeretnénk olyan zenei adattulajdonosokat találni, akik láthatóbbá és használhatóbbá szeretnék tenni a gyűjteményeiket Magyarországon. A másodlagos cél az előadásban bemutatott nyílt forráskodú technikák és nyílt adatok kulturájának a terjesztése Magyarországon.

ELTE Digital Heritage Meetup

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

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Open Music Observatory

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0100

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Data Sharing Spaces for CSRD

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

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Dataweek²⁴: Introducing a new European music dataspace

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:30:00 +0100

Daniel Antal introduced on the part 2 of Data Week 2024 and LAILEC the Open Music Observatory, the subjective take of the Open Music Europe consortium on creating a European data observatory with the help of a modern, federated, decentralised data-sharing space that is interoperable with various EU digital services. The short presentation was held in the plenary session (16.00-18.00.)

At 14.00, in the Data-driven automated compliance session (Room Erasmus 3), Daniel spoke about the Sustainability and Innovation pillars of the music observatory in light of the complex compliance issues raised by the CSRD Directive and the difficult-to-access but favourable green financing and insurance opportunities open for the music, film, and another creative sector.

If you are participating in Data Week Part 2 or LAILAC, please join the presentation or have an informal chat at the social dinner. Thanks to KU-Leuven and the Big Data Value Association for the organisation and invitation.

Open Music Observatory: Towards a European Music Dataspace

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 17:00:00 +0100

Check out the full presentation here, or the forming observatory on music.dataobservatory.eu.

Daniel Antal will introduce part 2 of Data Week 2024 and LAILEC, the Open Music Observatory, the subjective take of the Open Music Europe consortium on creating a European data observatory with the help of a modern, federated, decentralised data-sharing place that is interoperable with various EU digital services. The short presentation will be in the plenary session (16.00-18.00.)

At 14.00, in the Data-driven automated compliance session (Room Erasmus 3), Daniel will speak about the Sustainability and Innovation pillars of the music observatory in light of the complex compliance issues raised by the CSRD Directive and the difficult-to-access but favourable green financing and insurance opportunities open for the music, film, and another creative sector.

Hachaton, Registers for Cultural Entities

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

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Hallgass hazai zenéket

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

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IDCC24 Lightning Talk Session

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:15:00 +0000

Open Music Europe is a Horizon Europe project that aims to build a working prototype of the planned European Music Observatory.

Interested in our automated data observatories? Let us meet in Edinburgh on the 18th International Digital Curation Conference and discuss who you could use our open-source, collaborative data infrastructure and know-how.

The EU, UN, or other international bodies have recognised or initiated at least 60 data observatories that carry out long-term data collection on various domains; we have not found any good policies or practices on how to place these observatories on data infrastructures that are interoperable towards open science and open government. We are creating a data management and governance model and a working MVP that coordinates data collection and statistical data production among scientific, private and official statistical actors.

Our most crucial pilot project wants to showcase a best practice for using privately-held data, i.e., data of music organisations and surveys carried out by scientific and business actors, to improve the quality of government statistics. We show how the guidelines on using private data as an ‘administrative data source’ and an ex-ante harmonisation of governmental surveys with open scientific surveys can result in high-quality datasets that fully complement the pre-existing official statistical products and commercial products.

As a coordination tool, we started developing a Data Management Plan to increase transparency from the outset. Apart from applying Horizon Europe’s OpenAIRE recommendations and FAIR requirements, we use the Open Policy Analysis Guidelines to bring open science transparency into the less standardised policy analysis area. We implement this following various UN/EU Guidelines on statistical production, creating a three-way reconciliation and interoperability, i.e., scientific research, public policy design and official statistics.

Click through to our working paper (available in PDF, epub, and html).

Our work contributes to sharing outputs earlier using Open Research platforms because we are building a framework supported by research automation that integrates open science, business, and official governmental data. We develop a software ecosystem complementing the R statistical environment and language, the lingua franca of official and scientific statistics, to make the data curation, pre-processing, processing, and eventual quality-controlled statistical data release open, transparent, and much timelier.

Our project follows an open collaboration framework that we design so that private music NGOs and enterprises, statistical offices and open science research groups can work together on the curation and design, production and release and use of data assets in the cultural domain. By opening the statistical infrastructure with our open-source production code and implementing the statistical data and metadata exchange standards simultaneously with other metadata standards and standardisation techniques like ex-ante and retrospective survey harmonisation, we hope to combine them in novel ways like never before while making them available sooner.

https://music.dataobservatory.eu/documents/open_music_europe/slovakia/slovak-cult-stat-pilot.html

Our showcase product will be a twin, linked open data resource: the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database. It will connect in unprecedented detail information about musical works and their sound recordings and notations in music libraries, heritage organisations and individual and collective rights management organisations. We will derive the Slovak Music Industry Registry from this linked open resource that we will convert into a structural business register satellite as an interface between the privately-held data of music management and music heritage institutions and the national/satellite account system of the Slovak Republic, particularly the Slovak Cultural and Creative Satellite Accounts.

Let’s get in touch if you are interested.

Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:48:00 +0100

Tools to connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. As sound recordings, journal articles and books at the same place. Regardless in which country and what type of institution it is catalogued and made available.

We love Wikidata, because we believe in open knowledge, and we believe in linking open data, and Wikidata is the easiest, most open, most accessible way to place information on linked open knowledge graphs.

Linking open data can make songs, films, books, photographs easier to find, to reuse. To connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. The book of War and Peace with the locations in Leo Tolstoy’s monumental work. And then with other locations that were dubbing in the recent BBC adoption of the book. And connect them with the earlier one, filmed in the former Yugoslavia.

Reprex is seeking partners to connect archive and collection inventories automatically, actively rights-managed music, film, and photography catalogues to link public archive, rights management metadata via Wikidata into a self-correcting metadata system, improving and ensuring that machines find the correct information about European or global cultural content. We want to build an open-source tool to make this process automatic and painless.

The BBC’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, much of which was filmed in Lithuania, sparked sparked huge interest in the country abroad. The series featured Vilnius’ Old Town and major sights in Vilnius including Gediminas Castle, Vilnius University and other areas like Trakų Vokė. More than six million British viewers tuned in for its first episode in January.

Our next product is the development of an open source tool (and an app) that brings your reliable catalogue or collection information to the format of Wikidata. It will show what is already known about your collection or catalogue items “on the internet” and selects information that can be filled or improved, and provides a connection to the mass uploader.

A video tutorial on how to use QuickStatements to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

Providing a proper data representation to historically underrepresented groups, like women in the example of bulk updating monument data about monumental women by Dr Sara Thomas, or films from small countries, literature from small languages, or niche genre music is essential in the era of AI. Current global platforms for music, film, books, use machine learning that are trained on large open datasets like Wikidata and connecting sources. These automated systems, like automatic recommendations, will not recommend to suitable audiences this diverse content that lower quality or lacking machine-readable metadata representation.

Links

University of Edinburgh Media Hopper Create: How to use QuickStatements - a tool to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Hannah Rothmann, September 7th, 2020.
Lithuania Tribune: War and Peace tourist trail launches in Vilnius, March 31, 2016.
Wikidata: Linked open data workflow

Listen Local Utrecht

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 18:30:00 +0000

Our Listen Local project aims to develop tools that can be used by independent labels and self-releasing artists to make sure that their music finds relevant audiences in their scene, in their geographical environment and abroad.

The purpose of the meetup is to provide an informal setting to get to know each other, or exchange ideas and get into action. RSV on Eventbrite, on Keybase or via the contact form.

We are working with leading EU and UK universities and industry associations to find out why sometimes Utrecht-based music is not recommended to people in Utrecht on streaming platforms? Or how we could build applications that bring the local music ecosystem into the attention of visitors, tourists? Or how we could build games or educational applications that help local youth, pupils, students, educators, with artists in their town, and expand their music discovery to the province, their country, neighboring countries, instead of only recommending a few artists from New York, London, Rio de Janeiro or Seoul.

With the help of MusicAIRE and Horizon Europe, Europe’s premiere research and innovation grant, we are building open source tools to help to solve these problems, or allow other developers to build new applications and games.

Reprex is a member of the Dutch AI Coalition’s Culture and Media Working Group. The Dutch AI Coalition wants to make sure that algorithms work for all. This informal event will take place after the annual gathering of the working group from 9.00-18.00, with working groups members optional visit the Culture AI Lab.

Interested in the Dutch AI Coalition event?

If you are interested in those professional events, get in touch with us on Keybase or via the contact form.

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This article, published in JIPITEC in 2022, remains one of our most cited works on copyright, metadata, and cultural policy.

The paper shows how fragmented copyright metadata undermines the visibility of European creative works, causes royalty losses for artists, and limits the ability of European industries to compete globally in emerging areas like AI training and recommender systems.

Using the music industry as a central case study, the article highlights why improved metadata and licensing infrastructures are vital. Its findings directly connect to our current projects on trustworthy AI, cultural data spaces, and fair remuneration systems.

📄 Read the published version in JIPITEC: Full text PDF
📄 Preprint version available on SSRN: SSRN abstract

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

SKCMDb: The Slovak Comprehensive Music Database

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Wikimuseum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Open Music Observatory | Antal Dániel honlapja

Open Access Music Dataspaces – Open Music Observatory

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo Semantic Browser

Next steps

Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

SKCMDb

Early Data Access

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo Semantic Browser

Next steps

Project History

European Interoperability Framework for Music

Music Data Sharing Space

Disseminating information

Our Demo

Context: Open Music Observatory

References

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

ELTE Digital Heritage Meetup

Diák navigálása

Open Music Observatory

Slide navigation

Data Sharing Spaces for CSRD

Slide Navigation (press F)

Dataweek²⁴: Introducing a new European music dataspace

Open Music Observatory: Towards a European Music Dataspace

Hachaton, Registers for Cultural Entities

Slide navigation

Hallgass hazai zenéket

Slide navigation

IDCC24 Lightning Talk Session

Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata

Listen Local Utrecht

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Slide Navigation

Press F on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

SKCMDb: The Slovak Comprehensive Music Database

Slide Navigation (press F)

Building Blocks

Questions?

Wikimuseum

Slide Navigation

Press F on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

Press `F` on your keyboard

Press `F` on your keyboard