Alpha Site Up

Posted on June 29, 2006 by Rufus Pollock

As of last weekend there is a alpha version of the registry up at:

If all went well Tom Chance demoed this at the iCommons summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The database system and its interface is in alpha stage and the site is a prototype designed for testing purposes. In particular:

  • This site only contains recordings from the UK for 1900
  • The site is based on a wiki. A wiki does not provide a structured enough storage format for the underlying metadata and we need to move to a proper database backend

We need your help both in experimenting with the data and interface and with developing this prototype into a full sytem. To find out how to get involved see participate. If you have comments please post them either here on the registry.

There’s a project on knowledgeforge with all the code:

There’s also a mailing list (discussion, development etc) is:

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Composer Data

Posted on May 25, 2006 by Rufus Pollock

Many moons ago I came across:

Which has lots of data on authors, books and composers (the guy seems to be transcribing a large amount of the US copyright register by hand!).

In the light of our work on the db I wrote to the owner of the site at the start of May and, to my slight surprise, got an immediate response (email addresses on websites are usually dead due to spam). Philip Harper who runs the site was extremely helpful and while not able to make available the general author data as he is planning a semi-commercial collaboration with it he was happy to provide us his composer list as public domain data. I have now posted this up here:

Details of the License for the Data

From Philip Harper’s email:

Rufus Pollock wrote
> Also, just for clarity what license would you make available under? (Public Domain, CC Attribution, etc)

It’s so small, and by the time you get anywhere worthwhile it’ll be so small a component, that it’s not worth making any reservations, so straight Public Domain – do whatever you like with it, without attribution or other conditions, and if you can make money out of it, good luck!

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