RiC / MCN An explanation on the new ARTIST pages

This is our second post about the new system we implemented at Rock in China and Music-China.org and within this post we talk about the new ARTIST pages and what new possibilities arise.

First of all, when opening a page, e.g. Carsick Cars, any reader is giving two visual impressions of the band:

• a band photo (as before)
• and a Youtube video (for everyone outside of China)

The other standard data such as Artist Origin, name, Genre and other information is as usual displayed in the table underneath the profile pic and now also within two additional boxes before the general history starts:

This data is not entered anymore with a simple wiki template in wiki code but we are offering a standard form that can be reached by the “edit with form” tag on top of the artist page.

This form is generated via the Semantic Forms extension and each input in this form will not only appear on the ARTIST page itself, but will also be used on other pages. E.g. When one enters a GENRE or several genres into the respective field, our system understands that Carsick Cars is e.g. a ROCK and an INDIE artist. As such on the respective genre pages, the band would appear in the band list, its records in the record list, and, if a youtube video ID is entered, also in the list of randomly selected music videos.

When the ORIGIN or PRESENT LOCATION of a band is entered, e.g. Beijing or Wuhan, then the artist gets automatically associated with the city and the band count on the CITY page is going up by one.

Coming to the next new feature: semantic connections to the Open Linked Data world in the web! Sounds… unmusical? unsure what it means? Basically with the following wiki template that is being placed on nearly every site of RockinChina & Music-China we are connecting our system with the systems of the web:

Called “Definitions” one has the option to enter a number of URIs or Links to major websites such as

• Wikipedia
• DBPedia (same as wikipedia, just semantic)
• Freebase
• Musicbrainz
• Youtube

We use these links to enable the following:

There are two collapsible tables at the bottom of the page:

• Further videos – which uses the “Freebase ID” (/m/……) to call up to 50 music videos about the ARTIST from Youtube and include them in our system
• Further definitions – which uses semantic data linking (sameas or foaf:primaryTopic) to link our ARTIST page to corresponding ARTIST pages in the web

What are the benefits?

1. With the semantic linking we can tell the machines in the world that our CARSICK CARS artist is the same CARSICK CARS artist as already written about on Wikipedia, Freebase, Musicbrainz and DBPedia, and well… yes also the same CARSICK CARS that has an automatic youtube channel!
2. Machines and humans alike can now check out the other pages and compare the content and information. In the future it will be also possible for machines and persons that are on Youtube or that surf on Wikipedia to understand that RockinChina and Music-China has also a page and probably with more content. So Chinese artists will be found more easily.
3. All the data that is entered about an ARTIST, such as the image, the name, the founding city, can not be attributed not only on RockinChina but also on DBPedia. Machines know that CARSICK CARS on DBPedia is the same CARSICK CARS as on RockinChina. But only on RockinChina the complete data set is available. DBPedia can now import the data set and complete their data along with a reference link to the extensive history page at Rock in China.
4. The same is true for Musicbrainz, which is already in talks to use Rock in China as an official whitelisted database! With semantics in place, it will be possible to update either our records or the musicbrainz ones respectively!
5. In conclusion that means: Whenever you enter data at Rock in China about a Chinese band, you will feed the Open Linked Data cloud with this data and enable the world to learn about the band, the artist, the record, the music scene of China!

Filed under: Article, Website News Tagged: Artist Page, Explanation, Music-China.org, RockinChina