Open Metadata

From Open Knowledge Foundation

Purpose

To create an open database of metadata for cultural works (books, music, films).

Scope of Work

The database should be kept narrowly focused. So, for example, it would **not** include any additional information such as ratings, reviews, public domain status etc since these can be added by other projects.

Instead the database should focus on producing a well-defined reusable set of core data.

Metadata

• Created: 2006-06 (in present form)
• Coordinators:
  • SaulAlbert
  • RufusPollock
  • FC-UK Public Domain Burn project
• Mailing list: (provisional) http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

Background

Public Domain Works Database

This idea first surfaced in discussion of a digitizing public domain recordings back in 2004, see http://www.okfn.org/fcd/wiki/PublicDomainRegister.

Free Culture UK took this up as one of their launch projects in July 2005: http://www.freeculture.org.uk/PublicDomainBurn/

Part of that work involves building a database of public domain works and the OKF is collaborating with Free Culture UK in developing this database. The current project both generalizes and specializes that pd works database.

Blog post from 2006-06: http://blog.okfn.org/2006/06/29/public-domain-works-database-project/

Other Items

There was some parallel discussion focused on a film database on okfn-discuss. The start of the thread is here: http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pdb-discuss/2006-July/000078.html

An outline of the general metadata db can be found in this email to pdb-discuss from July 2006: http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pdb-discuss/2006-July/000078.html

Existing Work

• Open Library
• Discussion from 1999: http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001ghj -- does not seem that anything came of this
• http://www.freedb.org/ -- metadata database oriented to CDs
• Musicbrainz -- also oriented to CDs but uses a CC NC license for some portions of the database, PD for main part, see http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainzLicense
• http://www.imdb.com/ -- imdb is now owned by Amazon and is very definitely not open (see http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2006-April/000041.html)
• Format Exchange -- A project of the Long Now Foundation. Web site has only shown splash page for many months, though I wouldn't consider it dead yet. Quoting: "The idea is to build a clearing house for File Format Conversion (similar to what our Rosetta Project has done for languages). This will be a central repository and discussion space for file format conversion to aid in knowledge transfer. The goal is to build a community and tool to help allow the information we are all now creating digitally to move into the future."
• http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/HAudio_RDFa
• http://sw.joanneum.at/rammx/