Queen Mary University receives grant to implement new RDF web service for MusicBrainz

The School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University in London just received a grant to implement a new RDF based web service and a SPARQL endpoint for this web service.

The grant will be administered by Queen Mary University and will mean that one developer will be paid for one year to work on this project. This developer will be part of the MusicBrainz development team and will take part in our usual activities, meetings and code review process.

While we have an RDF based web service already, its worth noting that this has been stale for many years and has not been developed in favor of our XML web service. The XML web service has seen an amazing adoption and it would seem that having another web service would be superfluous. They key here is that the Linked Data world (formerly the semantic web) predominantly uses RDF as its preferred means of linking data. In order for MusicBrainz to continue to be well linked to the Linked Data world, it is important for us to continue to support an RDF web service. This grant very cleanly supports this goal and it also shows that the academic world thinks that MusicBrainz is of value and that it should be supported.

Congratulations to the Queen Mary University team that worked on this application! For nearly all of the gory details (the detailed budget figures have been stripped from the application for privacy sake) please see the PDF grant application.

I will be working with the hired developer to write up a detailed wiki page that will explain this project in much more detail. In the meantime if you have any questions, please read the grant application.

Congratulations to the whole team at Queen Mary University London!

More network maintenance over the weekend

Our hosting provider says:

Date: Saturday, 6/05/2010, 11:59 PM Pacific Time to Sunday, 6/06/2010, 01:30 AM Pacific Time

Digital West will be performing necessary maintenance to our switch farm. This may result in brief losses (10 seconds to 4 minutes) of Internet connectivity between the times listed above, depending on the nature of the service you subscribe to at Digital West. If you are multi-homed, the disruption will be minimal. If you are single-homed, you may notice longer delays.

MusicBrainz Pub Gathering in London on 16 June

I will be in London again soon and its been a while since we’ve gathered to have a pint. If you’re in or near London and feel like meeting up with other Brainerz, please keep the evening of June 16th open.

If anyone has any suggestions for a pub that is reasonably central, but not overly noisy, please make a comment in this blog post.

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you!

New tagger affiliate: My Music Collection

My Music Collection from Nuclear Coffee just joined our Tagger Affiliate program (never mind that its not a tagger. 🙂 ):

My Music Collection provides you with an innovative way to organize and manage your CDs, vinyl records and other media. This music collection software is designed to meet the needs any kind of collectors – from home users with large collections to professional DJs

Welcome, My Music Collection!

New release editor

For anyone who wishes to take a look at our new release editor, its now live on test.musicbrainz.org . Use your normal MusicBrainz account credentials to log in.

Click on this link to view an example release. There are still many things that are missing from this release editor and we need to wait for Warp to add more of the JavaScript portions to make it work right, but you should be able top get the right idea.

Thanks for your hard work on this Warp!

Where is NGS Beta 2?

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news? NGS Beta 2 will be delayed by 4 weeks until June 21st. The good news? Read on!

The main reason why we’re having to slip the release is that we’ve finally found a UX design volunteer (Alisa Lemberg aka Aleeeza) who has been working with us to design a release editor that works well for the broad range of users we have. We had to go back quite a few steps in our previous work to come up with a sane release editor. Having a good user experience for one of the most critical pieces of MusicBrainz was more important to us than keeping our beta 2 schedule. In the nick of time for our deadline the new release editor will be available for public input as soon as Ollie (slacker!) is done updating the test server. Expect another post tomorrow.

The second reason that we’re behind is that we decided to make some really important fixes to the new Web Service. We’re going to ensure that the vast number of releases credited to Johann Sebastian Bach do not execute a denial of service attack on our servers (this is part the dreaded JSB problem). Warp has written a new specification for the new Web Service that illustrates our new approach. Unfortunately Beta 2 will not include the new browsing features discussed, but the other aspects will be adapted as per spec for beta 2.

Third, Ollie will shoot to finish all NGS edits (including migrating old edits) for the beta 2 release. This will make beta 2 complete with all of the most important features!

We’ve also agreed to add one more beta release (called Release Candidate 1) before we release NGS in order to give more exposure to NGS as we get closer to finishing.

Finally, we’re considering delaying a number of non-critical features to the releases beyond NGS. The dashboard, timeline, statistics and auto-editor elections are not critical for us delivering NGS. But, the development of NGS has dragged on long enough that we really ought to finish as soon as possible and that may mean delaying these features for a little while. (we can do auto editor elections by hand on a mailing list if need be). We’re not dropping these features — we’re simply delaying them for a few weeks past the NGS release (and perhaps a hot bug fix release immediately post NGS).

What do you think about us dropping non-critical features in exchange for delivering NGS sooner? Tell us about it in the comments!

Six Degrees of Black Sabbath

For many years I’ve espoused MusicBrainz should collect enough information that would allow us to track connections between disparate artists through a game of six degrees of separation. And now Paul Lamere from the EchoNest has done exactly this for Music Hack Day San Francisco.

Six degrees of Black Sabbath allows you to enter two artists and it will search the MusicBrainz advanced relationships to find a connection between your two artists. See Paul’s blog post for more details.

Very very cool to see interesting applications like this appear in the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

Thanks Paul!

Possible network outages tomorrow

Digital West (our hosting company) will be performing switch maintenance tomorrow:

Date: Saturday, 5/22/2010, 11:59 PM Pacific Time to 12:30 AM Pacific Time

Digital West will be performing necessary maintenance to our switch farm. This may result in brief losses (10 seconds to 4 minutes) of Internet connectivity between the times listed above, depending on the nature of the service you subscribe to at Digital West.

For once it won’t be our fault that you can’t reach MusicBrainz. 🙂