Report on the Linked Music Hackathon, 9 October 2015, London

by Kevin Page, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford

IMG_7228On Friday 9th October over 25 academics and developers gathered for a Linked Music Hackathon, the culminating event of the Semantic Linking of BBC Radio (SLoBR) project led by Dr Kevin Page from the Oxford e-Research Centre. The project, funded by the EPSRC Semantic Media Network, has applied Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies to combine cultural heritage and media industry sources for the benefit of academic and commercial research — and is research which will be developed and extended within the Fusing Audio and Semantic Technology (FAST) project.

Attendees were able to use data produced by SLoBR and more than 20 other Linked Data music sources to produce new mashups prototyped and presented on the same day. A variety of hacks were shown at the end of the event with the winning project “Geobrowsing using RISM” chosen by popular vote. A Radio 1 team were also in attendance to interview attendees for the BBC’s “Make It Digital” campaign.

The hackathon was hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, by colleagues from SLoBR and assisted by the Transforming Musicology project. Organisers and participants from the FAST project included David De Roure, Graham Klyne, Kevin Page, John Pybus, and David Weigl.