Situation Analysis:

Dr. Dre is one of the artists in the Linked Data Space we host for the BBC. He is also referenced in music oriented data spaces such as DBpedia, MusicBrainz and Last.FM (to name a few).

Challenge:

How do I obtain a holistic view of the entity "Dr. Dre" across the BBC, MusicBrainz, and Last.FM data spaces? We know the BBC published Linked Data, but what about Last.FM and MusicBrainz? Both of these data spaces only expose XML or JSON data via REST APIs?

Solution:

Simple 3 step Linked Data Meshup courtesy of Virtuoso's in-built RDFizer Middleware "the Sponger" (think ODBC Driver Manager for the Linked Data Web) and its numerous Cartridges (think ODBC Drivers for the Linked Data Web).

Steps:

  1. Go to Last.FM and search using pattern: Dr. Dre (you will end up with this URL: http://www.last.fm/music/Dr.+Dre)
  2. Go to the Virtuoso powered BBC Linked Data Space home page and enter: http://bbc.openlinksw.com/about/html/http://www.last.fm/music/Dr.+Dre
  3. Go to the BBC Linked Data Space home page and type full text pattern (using default tab): Dr. Dre, then view Dr. Dre's metadata via the Statistics Link.

What Happened?

The following took place:

  1. Virtuoso Sponger sent an HTTP GET to Last.FM
  2. Distilled the "Artist" entity "Dr. Dre" from the page, and made a Linked Data graph
  3. Inverse Functional Property and sameAs reasoning handled the Meshup (augmented graph from a conjunctive query processing pipeline)
  4. Links for "Dr. Dre" across BBC (sameAs), Last.FM (seeAlso), via DBpedia URI.

The new enhanced URI for Dr. Dre now provides a rich holistic view of the aforementioned "Artist" entity. This URI is usable anywhere on the Web for Linked Data Conduction :-)

Related (as in NearBy)