The Music Ontology

Relates an artist to an activity period

Used to link a work or the expression of a work to its corresponding Amazon ASINs page.

    Associates a work to an arrangement event where it was arranged

            Associates an arrangement event to a work

Relates a membership event with the corresponding artist

    Relates a musical manifestation to a musical item (this album, and my particular cd). By using
    this property, there is no assumption on wether the full content is available on the linked item.
    To be explicit about this, you can use a sub-property, such as mo:item (the full manifestation
    is available on that item) or mo:preview (only a part of the manifestation is available on
    that item).

    This is a subproperty of frbr:examplar.

Used to link an artist to their online biography.

Used to relate two collaborating people on a work.

Indicates that a musical manifestation is a compilation of several Signals.

Used to relate an person or a group of person who compiled the manifestation of a musical work.

Used to relate the manifestation of a musical work to a person or a group of person who compiled it.

    Associates a MusicalWork to the Composition event pertaining
    to its creation. For example, I might use this property to associate
    the Magic Flute to its composition event, occuring during 1782 and having as
    a mo:composer Mozart.

    Associates a composition event to the actual composer. For example,
    this property could link the event corresponding to the composition of the
    Magic Flute in 1782 to Mozart himself (who obviously has a FOAF profile:-) ).

Relates agents to the performances they were conducting

Relates a performance to the conductor involved

    Relates a signal to another signal, which has been sampled.

A related signal from which the described signal is derived.

Used to links an artist to an online discography of their musical works. The discography should provide a summary of each released musical work of the artist.

Used to link a musical work or the expression of a musical work, an artist or a corporate body to to its corresponding Discogs page.

Indicates that all (or most of) the tracks of a musical work or the expression of a musical work were mixed together from all (or most of) the tracks from another musical work or the expression of a musical work to form a so called DJ-Mix.

The tracks might have been altered by pitching (so that the tempo of one track matches the tempo of the following track) and fading (so that one track blends in smoothly with the other). If the tracks have been more substantially altered, the "mo:remix" relationship type is more appropriate.

Used to relate an artist who djmixed a musical work or the expression of a musical work.

The artist usually selected the tracks, chose their sequence, and slightly changed them by fading (so that one track blends in smoothly with the other) or pitching (so that the tempo of one track matches the tempo of the following track). This applies to a 'Mixtape' in which all tracks were DJ-mixed together into one single long track.

Used to relate a work or the expression of a work to an artist who djmixed it.

The artist usually selected the tracks, chose their sequence, and slightly changed them by fading (so that one track blends in smoothly with the other) or pitching (so that the tempo of one track matches the tempo of the following track). This applies to a 'Mixtape' in which all tracks were DJ-mixed together into one single long track.

            This property can be used to link from a person to the website where they make their works available, or from
            a manifestation (a track or an album, for example) to a web page where it is available for
            download.

    It is better to use one of the three sub-properties instead of this one in order to specify wether the
    content can be accessed for free (mo:freedownload), if it is just free preview material (mo:previewdownload), or
    if it can be accessed for some money (mo:paiddownload) (this includes links to the Amazon store, for example).

            This property MUST be used only if the content is just available through a web page (holding, for example
            a Flash application) - it is better to link to actual content directly through the use of mo:available_as and
            mo:Stream, mo:Torrent or mo:ED2K, etc. Therefore, Semantic Web user agents that don't know how to read HTML and even
            less to rip streams from Flash applications can still access the audio content.

    Relates a MusicalItem (a track on a particular CD, an audio file, a stream somewhere) to the signal it encodes.

    This is usually a lower-resolution version of the master signal (issued from a Recording event).

Relates a performance or a recording to the engineer involved

Relates agents to the performances/recordings they were engineering in

Links a particular event to a web page

A person, a group of person or an organization exchanging an exemplar of a single manifestation.

Used to link an artist to a fan-created webpage devoted to that artist.

    This property can be used to link from a person to the website where they make their works available, or from
    a manifestation (a track or an album, for example) to a web page where it is available for free 
    download.

    This property MUST be used only if the content is just available through a web page (holding, for example
    a Flash application) - it is better to link to actual content directly through the use of mo:available_as and 
    mo:Stream, mo:Torrent or mo:ED2K, etc. Therefore, Semantic Web user agents that don't know how to read HTML and even
    less to rip streams from Flash applications can still access the audio content.

    Associates an event (like a performance or a recording) to a particular musical genre.
    Further version of this property may also include works and scores in the domain.

Relates a membership event with the corresponding group

Relates a performance to the headliner(s) involved

Links an artist, a record, etc. to a corresponding web page

Indicates a pictorial image (JPEG, GIF, PNG, Etc.) of a musical work, the expression of a musical work, the manifestation of a work or the examplar of a manifestation.

Used to link an artist, a musical work or the expression of a musical work to their equivalent page on IMDb, the InternetMovieDatabase.

Relates a performance to a musical instrument involved

Adds an involved music artist, who interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified an existing signal, which resulted in the signal that is here the subject of this relation.

            Relates a musical manifestation to a musical item (this album, and my particular cd) holding the
            entire manifestation, and not just a part of it.

    Indicated the key used by the musicians during a performance, or the key of a MusicalWork.
    Any of 24 major or minor diatonic scales that provide the tonal framework for a piece of music.

Associates a release event with the label releasing the record

Used to link a work or the expression of a work to the license under which they can be manipulated (downloaded, modified, etc).

This is usually used to link to a Creative Commons licence.

Relates agents to the performances they were listening in

Relates a performance to the listener involved

Associates lyrics with a musical work

Used to link a musical work or the expression of a musical work to a website where people can buy a copy of the musical manifestation.

Indicates that musical works or the expressions of a musical work were mashed up on this album or track.

This means that two musical works or the expressions of a musical work by different artists are mixed together, over each other, or otherwise combined into a single musical work (usually by a third artist, the remixer).

The mediatype (file format or MIME type, or physical medium) of a musical manifestation, e.g. a MP3, CD or vinyl.

Indicates that a musical expression is a medley of several other musical expressions.

This means that the orignial musical expression were rearranged to create a new musical expression in the form of a medley.

    Indicates a member of a musical group

Inverse of the foaf:member property

Relates an agent with related membership events

Indicates that a musical work has movements

    Linking an agent, a track or a record to its corresponding Musicbrainz page.

Used to link an artist, a musical work or the expression of a musical work to its corresponding MusicMoz page.

Used to link a person to its corresponding MySpace page.

Used to link a track to a tabulature file for track in the On-Line Guitar Archive.

Used to link a person with an online community web page like a blog, a wiki, a forum, a livejournal page, Etc.

Relates an artist to its geographic origin

Indicates that two musical manifestations are essentially the same.

            Provide a link from an artist to a web page where all of that artist's musical work is available for some money,
            or a link from a manifestation (record/track, for example) to a web page providing a paid access to this manifestation.

    Associates a Performance to a musical work or an arrangement that is being used as a factor in it.
    For example, I might use this property to attach the Magic Flute musical work to 
    a particular Performance.

Relates agents to the performances they were performing in

    Associates a Musical Work or an Score to Performances in which they were
    a factor. For example, I might use this property in order to 
    associate the Magic Flute to a particular performance at the Opera
    Bastille last year.

Relates a performance to the performers involved

A person, a group of person or an organization possessing an exemplar of a single manifestation.

            Relates a musical manifestation to a musical item (this album, and my particular cd), which holds
            a preview of the manifestation (eg. one track for an album, or a snippet for a track)

            This property can be used to link from a person to the website where they make previews of their works available, or from
            a manifestation (a track or an album, for example) to a web page where a preview download is available.

            This property MUST be used only if the content is just available through a web page (holding, for example
            a Flash application) - it is better to link to actual content directly through the use of mo:available_as and
            mo:Stream, mo:Torrent or mo:ED2K, etc. Therefore, Semantic Web user agents that don't know how to read HTML and even
            less to rip streams from Flash applications can still access the audio content.

Indicates that an artist primarily plays an instrument, or that a member was primarily playing a particular instrument during his membership

Used to relate an person or a group of person who produced the manifestation of a work.

    Associates an arrangement or a composition event to a score product (score here does not refer to a published score, but more
    an abstract arrangement of a particular work).

            Associates a Recording to the outputted signal.

Associates a recording session with a group of master signals produced by it.

            Associates a Performance to a physical Sound that is being produced by it.

            Associates a composition event to the produced MusicalWork. For example,
            this property could link the event corresponding to the composition of the
            Magic Flute in 1782 to the Magic Flute musical work itself. This musical work
            can then be used in particular performances.

Used to relate the manifestation of a work to a person or a group of person who produced it.

Link a particular manifestation to the related signal, score, libretto, or lyrics

Used to relate an person or a group of person who published the manifestation of a work.

    Links a musical expression (e.g. a signal or a score) to one of its manifestations (e.g. a track on a particular record or a published score).

Used to relate a musical manifestation to a person or a group of person who published it.

    Relates a musical manifestation to its publication location.

Associates a release with the records it contains. A single release can be associated with multiple records, for example for a multi-disc release.

    This is a shortcut property, allowing to bypass all the Sound/Recording steps. This property
    allows to directly link a Performance to the recorded Signal. This is recommended for "normal"
    users. However, advanced users wanting to express things such as the location of the microphone will
    have to create this shortcut as well as the whole workflow, in order to let the "normal" users access
    simply the, well, simple information:-) .

        Associates a physical Sound to a Recording event where it is being used 
    in order to produce a signal. For example, I might use this property to 
    associate the sound produced by a particular performance of the magic flute
    to a given recording, done using my cell-phone.

        Associates a Recording event to a physical Sound being recorded.
            For example, I might use this property to
            associate a given recording, done using my cell phone, to the 
    sound produced by a particular performance of the magic flute.

    This is the inverse of the shortcut property recordedAs, allowing to relate directly a performance
    to a signal.

Associates a release with the corresponding release event

            Relates a musical manifestation to its release status (bootleg, ...)

    Relates a musical manifestation to its release type (interview, spoken word, album, ...)

This relates two musical work or the expression of a musical work, where one is a remaster of the other.

A remaster is a new version made for release from source recordings that were earlier released separately. This is usually done to improve the audio quality or adjust for more modern playback equipment. The process generally doesn't involve changing the music in any artistically important way. It may, however, result in tracks that are a few seconds longer or shorter.

Used to relate the remix of a musical work in a substantially altered version produced by mixing together individual tracks or segments of an original musical source work.

Used to relate an artist who remixed a musical work or the expression of a musical work.

This involves taking just one other musical work and using audio editing to make it sound like a significantly different, but usually still recognisable, song. It can be used to link an artist to a single song that they remixed, or, if they remixed an entire musical work.

Used to relate a musical work or the expression of a musical work to an artist who remixed it.

This involves taking just one other musical work and using audio editing to make it sound like a significantly different, but usually still recognisable, song. It can be used to link an artist to a single song that they remixed, or, if they remixed an entire musical work.

Used to link a work or the expression of a work to a review.

The review does not have to be open content, as long as it is accessible to the general internet population.

Used to relate an artist who sampled a Signal.

    Associates an analog signal with a sampled version of it

    Associates a digital signal with the analog version of it

Used to relate the signal of a musical work to an artist who sampled it.

A person, a group of person or an organization selling an exemplar of a single manifestation.

Associates a group of signals with one of the signals it contains

        A similarity relationships between two objects (so far, either an agent, a signal or a genre, but
    this could grow).
    This relationship is pretty general and doesn't make any assumptions on how the similarity claim
    was derived.
    Such similarity statements can come from a range of different sources (Musicbrainz similarities between
    artists, or coming from some automatic content analysis).
    However, the origin of such statements should be kept using a named graph approach - and ultimately, the 
    documents providing such statements should attach some metadata to themselves (confidence of the claim, etc.).

Relates a performance to an involved singer

Used to relate an artist doing long-time instrumental or vocal support for another artist.

    Associates a Signal to a time object - its actual domain

Indicates a part of a musical manifestation - in this particular case, a track.

Indicates that a work or the expression of a work has translated or transliterated into another expression of a work.

Indicates a musical work or the expression of a musical work that is a tribute to an artist - normally consisting of music being composed by the artist but performed by other artists.

A person, a group of person or an organization wanting an exemplar of a single manifestation.

    Used to link an work, an expression of a work, a manifestation of a work, 
    a person, an instrument or a musical genre to its corresponding WikiPedia page. 
    The full URL should be used, not just the WikiName.

    Associates a digital signal to the number a bits used to encode one sample. Range is xsd:int.

    Associates a signal to the number of channels it holds (mono --> 1, stereo --> 2). Range is xsd:int.

    Associates a digital signal to its sample rate. It might be easier to express it this way instead of
    defining a timeline map:-) Range is xsd:float.

Relates an artist to a date at which its activity ended

Relates an artist to a date at which its activity started

    Indicates the BPM of a MusicalWork or a particular Performance 
    Beats per minute: the pace of music measured by the number of beats occurring in 60 seconds.

Links a release with the corresponding catalogue number

The duration of a track or a signal in ms

The European Article Number (EAN) is a universal identifier for products, commonly printed in form of barcodes on them. The numbers represented by those codes can either be 8 or 13 digits long, with the 13-digit-version being most common. EANs form a superset of the North American Universal Product Code (UPC) as every UPC can be made an EAN by adding a leading zero to it. Additionally every EAN is also a Japanese Article Number (JAN). The identifiers were formerly assigned by EAN International which merged with Uniform Code Council (UCC, the guys behind the UPCs) and Electronic Commerce Council of Canada (ECCC) to become GS1.

Method used to convert analog electronic signals into digital format such as "MP3 CBR @ 128kbps", "OGG @ 160kbps", "FLAC", etc.

The Global Release Identifier (GRid) is a system for uniquely identifying Releases of music over electronic networks (that is, online stores where you can buy music as digital files). As that it can be seen as the equivalent of the BarCode (or more correctly the GTIN) as found on physical releases of music. Like the ISRC (a code for identifying single recordings as found on releases) it was developed by the IFPI but it does not appear to be a standard of the ISO.

GTIN is a grouping term for EANs and UPCs. In common speech those are called barcodes although the barcodes are just a representation of those identifying numbers.

The Interested Parties Information Code (IPI) is an ISO standard similar to ISBNs for identifying the people or groups with some involvement with a particular musical work / compositions.

The International Standard Music Number (ISMN) is an ISO standard similar to ISBNs for identifying printed music publications

The ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is the international identification system for sound recordings and music videorecordings. 
Each ISRC is a unique and permanent identifier for a specific recording which can be permanently encoded into a product as its digital fingerprint. 
Encoded ISRC provide the means to automatically identify recordings for royalty payments.

Links a musical work to the corresponding ISWC number

The Label Code (LC) was introduced in 1977 by the IFPI (International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Industries) in order to unmistakably identify the different record labels (see Introduction, Record labels) for rights purposes. The Label Code consists historically of 4 figures, presently being extended to 5 figures, preceded by LC and a dash (e.g. LC-0193 = Electrola; LC-0233 = His Master's Voice). Note that the number of countries using the LC is limited, and that the code given on the item is not always accurate.

Associates a musical work or a score with its meter

Indicates the position of a movement in a musical work.

Links an object to the corresponding Musicbrainz identifier

    Used to define a creative work, especially a musical composition numbered to designate the order of a composer's works.

    Link a signal to the PUIDs associated with it, that is, PUID computed from MusicalItems (mo:AudioFile) 
    derived from this signal.
    PUIDs (Portable Unique IDentifier) are the IDs used in the 
    proprietary MusicDNS AudioFingerprinting system which is operated by MusicIP.

    Using PUIDs, one (with some luck) can identify the Signal object associated with a particular audio file, therefore allowing
    to access further information (on which release this track is featured? etc.). Using some more metadata one can identify
    the particular Track corresponding to the audio file (a track on a particular release).

Associates a release with the number of records it contains, e.g. the number of discs it contains in the case of a multi-disc release.

Indicates the position of a record in a release (e.g. a 2xLP, etc.).

Associates the side on a vinyl record, where a track is located, e.g. A, B, C, etc. This property can then also be used in conjunction with mo:track_number, so that one can infer e.g. "A1", that means, track number 1 on side A.

    Rate of speed or pace of music. Tempo markings are traditionally given in Italian; 
    common markings include: grave (solemn; very, very slow); largo (broad; very slow); 
    adagio (quite slow); andante (a walking pace); moderato (moderate); allegro (fast; cheerful); 
    vivace (lively); presto (very fast); accelerando (getting faster); ritardando (getting slower); 
    and a tempo (in time; returning to the original pace).

Associates lyrics with their text.

The track count of a record

Indicates the position of a track on a record medium (a CD, etc.).

    Indicates the TRMID of a track.
    TRM IDs are MusicBrainz' old AudioFingerprinting system. 
    TRM (TRM Recognizes Music) IDs are (somewhat) unique ids that represent 
    the audio signature of a musical piece (see AudioFingerprint).

UPC stands for "Universal Product Code", which was the original barcode used in the United States and Canada. The UPC (now officially EAN.UCC-12 is a numerical method of identifying products without redundancy worldwide for all types of products in the retail sector. The EAN is a superset of the original UPC increasing the digits to 13 with the prefix 0 reserved for UPC. As of 2005, manufacturers are only allowed to use the new 13-digit codes on their items, rather than having two separate numbers.

        Links an object to an universally unique identifier for it.

    This annotation property associates to a particular Music Ontology term the corresponding
    expressiveness level. These levels can be:

        - 1: Only editorial/Musicbrainz type information
        - 2: Workflow information
        - 3: Even decomposition

    This property is mainly used for specification generation.