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Ontologies

MerMEId MeLODy does not define everything from scratch — it builds on well-established vocabularies from the cultural heritage and semantic web communities, with the MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) guidelines as the foundational reference for music-specific concepts. It adds a domain-specific ontology (MeLODy) that precisely mirrors MEI element structures to ensure that RDF metadata can be reliably transformed into standards-compliant MEI XML.

External Ontologies

Ontology Prefix Used for
LRMoo lrmoo: Core bibliographic hierarchy: Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item and their relationships
CIDOC-CRM cidoc: Events, places, actors (persons and institutions as agents), temporal and spatial modelling
Schema.org schema: Persons (name, birth/death dates and places, gender, external identifiers), organisations, basic descriptive metadata
DoReMus mus: Music-specific extensions: instrumentation, medium of performance, musical keys, casting
SKOS skos: Preferred labels (skos:prefLabel) used for entity display names and search index entries
OWL owl: owl:sameAs for linking to external authority records (GND, VIAF, Wikidata, GeoNames, etc.)
MEI — Music notation and encoding concepts; XML output tab converts to MEI format for interoperability

The MeLODy Ontology

MerMEId MeLODy defines its own Music Metadata Ontology (melod:) for concepts not covered by the standard vocabularies above — in particular the entity classes used in the editor and properties specific to the musicological use case. The concepts are based on the MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) guidelines and are mostly linked to the corresponding MEI elements. It implements the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) conceptual model, organizing musical information into Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item levels. MeLOD integrates established ontologies including Schema.org, LRMoo, CIDOC-CRM and DoReMus to provide a rich semantic framework for music metadata.

Ontology IRI: https://lod.academy/melod/vocab/ontology# Prefix: melod:

All entity types in the editor (Person, Place, Work, Expression, etc.) are subclasses or instances defined within this ontology. When you see a class or property prefixed with melod: in a Turtle file, it comes from here.

Example: a Person entity in Turtle

@prefix melod:  <https://lod.academy/melod/vocab/ontology#> .
@prefix schema: <https://schema.org/> .
@prefix owl:    <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix skos:   <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .

<urn:uuid:persons/2847362910>
    a melod:Person ;
    schema:familyName "Telemann" ;
    schema:givenName "Georg Philipp" ;
    schema:gender "male" ;
    owl:sameAs <http://d-nb.info/gnd/11862119X> .