On organising multimedia performance corpora for musicological study using Linked Data

Abstract

The wide availability of digital technologies has increased the quantity and diversity of information that can be collected from and about a musical performance. Making this data easily accessible for study by musicologists requires the development of supporting methodologies and tools to assist and automate its systematic cataloguing, archiving, and investigation. We report on the curation of a rich digital multimedia dataset captured from a complete performance of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, supplemented by observations annotated by a musicologist during the course of the event. We describe the application of ontologies to codify the physical and temporal relationships between the events, artefacts, and their creators or annotators; and the method and tools to publish these performance corpora as Linked Data hyperstructures abiding by this schema. Finally we discuss the implications for hosting this data within a Digital Library infrastructure and how it can be used to support musicological investigation.