JazzCats: Navigating an RDF triplestore of integrated performance metadata

Abstract

Applying Linked Data techniques to musical metadata can facilitate new paths of musicological inquiry. JazzCats: Jazz Collection of Aggregated Triples is a prototype project interlinking four discrete jazz performance datasets and external sources as references. Tabular, relational, and graph legacy datasets have necessitated different RDF production and ingestion workflows to support scholarly study of performance traditions. This paper highlights critical processes of data curation for digital libraries, including quality assessment of the ingested datasets. In addition, we describe research questions enabled by JazzCats, raise musicological implications, and offer suggestions to overcome current limitations.