Conference Agenda

Linked RISM is a prototype environment for experimenting with the RISM data as Linked Open Data. Developed as part of the RISM Online initiative, we have been gradually updating and improving this service as we move towards making it a publicly available and fully supported resource, delivered by the RISM Digital Center.

While it may be broadly known that RISM Online has a publicly available, machine-readable API, it is less known that the data from this API, delivered as JSON-LD, can be automatically transformed into Linked Data formats using purpose-built JSON-LD context documents. We have built our Linked RISM project around this functionality. We harvest the linked data from the public RISM Online APIs in the n-triple format, and subsequently load these triples into our own instance of Qlever, a Linked Data search engine (https://github.com/ad-freiburg/qlever). Incremental improvements to the RISM Online API and the JSON-LD context are reflected in improvements to the exported data. A SPARQL query interface is available at https://linked.rism.io/rism for querying the data. Currently we have over 91 million triples in this dataset, representing all of the primary record types available in RISM: Sources, People, Institutions, Incipits, Holdings and Works.

In this talk we will cover the current state of Linked RISM, the process of requesting and working with the Linked Data in RISM Online, a short overview of our SPARQL endpoint and its capabilities, and discuss the future of this effort, with an open invitation to try the service and provide feedback.

Digital music editions increasingly require data models that can represent interconnected historical, bibliographic, and analytical information. Traditional relational database management systems, while effective for structured and well-bounded datasets, often limit the expression of complex relationships and cross-repository connections that musicological inquiry depends on. This presentation will be thus exploring how knowledge graphs offer a more adaptable foundation for navigating and contextualizing music information in digital editions.

Building on ongoing discussions in music librarianship and digital musicology, the talk will demonstrate how RDF and Linked Data principles have supported the integration of heterogeneous assets such as descriptive metadata, concordances, editorial workflow information, and external references within the context of the E-LAUTE music edition. Practical attention will be given to transforming tabular datasets into triples, and to designing dereferenceable URIs that make digital edition content discoverable beyond its own original platform.

The presentation will further contrast relational and graph approaches by showing how the latter enable the formulation of musicological competency questions that rely on traversing relationships—such as identifying networks of people, places, sources, or transmission paths. It will also shed light on provenance documentation as a means of ensuring transparency in editorial and data-processing activities. Together, all these strategies will hopefully prove that knowledge graphs can be a powerful infrastructure for future-oriented digital music edition environments.

SLUB Dresden has been providing a central infrastructure for recording music events with Musiconn Performance for ten years. The database contains data from around 20 research projects, with the most recent covering the repertoire of all German symphony orchestras between 1949 and 2024. This presentation will report on the experiences of the infrastructure project, the numerous innovations in the database, and the challenges and plans for the coming years. It will also seek international cooperation opportunities.