Daniel Antal

Spaces of a Constructive Dialogue

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This project, developed more than twenty years ago shortly after my participation in a UK future leaders programme, represents one of my earliest attempts to create a structured, collaborative platform for emerging artists and curators. Conceived and executed by a group of very young practitioners, the initiative combined curatorial experimentation, documentation, and network-building at a time when such cross-disciplinary approaches were far less formalised than today.

The archival documents reflect both the ambition and the limitations of that moment: they are exploratory, the documentation is uneven, but already articulate a clear intention to connect artistic practice with broader structures, and the selected artists and their work is timeless. Looking back, what is most striking is not the program’s polish, but its orientation toward collaboration, visibility, and long-term cultural positioning—principles that have remained central in my later work.

A decade after the project, several of the participants went on to establish themselves as significant figures in the cultural field, developing independent artistic practices and contributing to international exhibitions and curatorial platforms. For example, curator Barnabás Bencsik later became the director of the Ludwig Museum, Endre Koronczi one of the most respected and socially engaged creative artists of Hungary, the young photographer Gergely László founded Lumen, which remains an iconic cultural location in Budapest, and became an established artist at Technica Schweitz. Their first credited work is the result of our collaboration.

Samu Szemery, co-curator of the architectural interventions on the branch lines of Nógrád County railways, became one of the founders of Hungary’s Contemporary Architecture Centre. I remain grateful for their enthusiastic participation, bravery, and friendship.

For me, this work marks a formative moment: an early prototype of the ecosystem thinking that would later underpin initiatives such as Reprex and the Open Music Observatory in a much more formalised and technological form. While the documents belong to a different stage of life, they already reveal a consistent concern with how cultural value is created, documented, and sustained over time—an interest that continues to define my professional and research practice.

The programme itself, titled Spaces of a Constructive Discourse, was conceived as follows:

Spaces of a Constructive Discourse

The programme was conceived as a structured initiative to create new forms of dialogue between cultural production and public life in Hungary during a period of social and economic transition, just in the months of Hungary’s EU accession. It aimed to explore how public art and cultural interventions could contribute to addressing societal issues, particularly where traditional institutional channels were limited or ineffective. Rather than treating art as autonomous, the programme positioned it as an active medium for engaging with public concerns and social realities.

At its core, the initiative functioned as a multi-stakeholder platform, bringing together artists, sociologists, civil society actors, policymakers, and local communities. Through workshops, discussions, and pilot projects, it created a space where different forms of knowledge—artistic, social scientific, and administrative—could interact. The intention was not only to generate artistic outcomes, but to enable mutual learning and to integrate insights from cultural practice into broader policy and institutional frameworks.

A key objective of the programme was to expand participation in public discourse, particularly by including voices that had previously been excluded from decision-making processes. It sought to develop mechanisms through which cultural projects could surface local problems, articulate new perspectives, and feed these back into governance and reform processes. In this sense, the programme anticipated later approaches to participatory culture and socially engaged art, framing cultural activity as part of a wider system of societal feedback and transformation.

Operationally, the programme followed a structured workflow: identifying social problems, conducting research, implementing public interventions, and evaluating outcomes, followed by feedback loops into future actions. It also placed strong emphasis on partnerships and clearly defined roles (curators, coordinators, mediators). Taken together, it can be understood as an early attempt to design cultural production as a systemic, collaborative process—linking artistic experimentation with institutional learning and long-term social impact.

One Song, Many Free Uses

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:45:00 +0100

Read our Substack blogpost

Livonian is a critically endangered European language related to Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian. A small community of Livonians are re-learning their ancestral language, and singing together is one of the most effective ways to practice.
For the first time, we made a recording of a Livonian dance song accessible on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. These platforms make the song available in almost every country, and some—like Spotify—offer it for free if you are willing to listen to advertisements. Continue reading on Substack…

When the Heir to the Throne Met the Udmurts

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:45:00 +0100

Read our Substack blogpost

One of these images — the photograph of the Votyaks (Вотяки: Russian exonym for Udmurts) — stands today as a foundational anchor of Udmurt photography. Like the companion images of Hill and Meadow Mari groups, it presents a small group posed as representative “types” of their people. The three female and two male figures stand in a group, dressed in carefully arranged garments that emphasise ethnic distinctiveness. The image was not intended as an intimate portrait, but as documentation: a visual taxonomy of empire. Continue reading on Substack…

Federating Open Knowledge through Wikibase: The Case of The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents the design and early implementation of the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space (DSS), a multilingual, community-driven prototype for linking cultural heritage data across institutional and geographic boundaries. Rather than a finished infrastructure, the DSS should be read as a blueprint and exploratory model—developed as a thought experiment with minimal resources but grounded in our prior work on music metadata governance involving both public and private actors. We use this experimental setting to review structural problems in existing Finno-Ugric knowledge systems: the negative outcomes of Wikipedia’s Livonian and Mari initiatives, the dispersion of diasporic knowledge, and the limitations of national GLAM infrastructures. Building on empirical literature and our own governance practice, we propose a lightweight federated infrastructure built on Wikibase and open ontologies, which enables multilingual vocabularies, contextual annotation, and ethical data linking without flattening local epistemologies. Case studies of Seto textile collections and the Hõimulõimed multilingual song archive illustrate how the prototype supports cultural reconstruction and participatory enrichment. While not an institutional solution, the DSS demonstrates how a semantically rich, community-anchored model can serve as a testbed for broader applications in low-scale cultural ecosystems.

Mari Clothing Heritage Across Collections

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:45:00 +0100

Read our Substack blogpost

Rather than building a new platform or launching a large institutional programme, we focused on a carefully designed, hands-on intervention. The goal was to create a concrete, working example that could be expanded, criticised, reused, and—crucially—taken up by others. Continue reading on Substack…

Open Access Music Dataspaces – Open Music Observatory

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:00:00 +0100

Panel topics
How does music shape the social and cultural fabric of Europe? What can patterns of music consumption reveal about policies, inclusion, and everyday life? Music is not only a mirror of culture, but also a living indicator of how communities evolve and interact. Today, the growing availability of music-related data opens new perspectives to understand the social value of music and its potential to build fairer and more sustainable ecosystems. When used responsibly, data can help policymakers, researchers, and professionals identify gaps, measure impact, and support better decision-making. By turning open data into collective knowledge, projects like OpenMusE aim to bring more transparency, visibility, and fairness to Europe’s music landscape, bridging analysis, policy, and creativity. Can data really become a common good for music? And how can openness drive the next phase of Europe’s cultural development?

The presentation introduces the Open Music Observatory (OMO), a federated, open-data infrastructure designed to repair long-standing metadata gaps in Europe’s music ecosystem. Building on the vision set by the feasibility study for the European Music Observatory, we show how fragmented, hidden, restricted, and unharmonised data can be aligned through shared standards and collaborative curation. Using Slovakia as a pilot case, we demonstrate how public and private stakeholders can jointly improve the visibility of national repertoire, reduce metadata errors that cause lost royalties, and strengthen cultural diversity in streaming and discovery systems.

We will present the OMO federation model, its Slovak deployment (SK Music Dataspace), and the ways institutions and developers can interact with the system: manual curation via Wikibase interfaces, automated ingestion through APIs, and compliant AI access through the Model Context Protocol. The talk highlights how interoperable data supports fairer recommendation systems, better attribution, improved royalty flows, and new research possibilities—illustrating how open, ethical data infrastructures can help smaller repertoires thrive in a globalised digital marketplace.

Wikibase as a Data Sharing Space: Connecting Rights, Communities, and GLAM through Federated Infrastructures

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:00:00 +0000

In our use scenario, Wikibase Suite provides a federated data-sharing space between Wikimedia projects, Europeana, and other trusted partners.

From the perspective of Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, it serves as a staging area and alternative incubator for datasets that are still under review, have mixed rights status, or originate from specialised community archives.

Key Ideas

Federation: connects open and restricted databases while preserving provenance.
Rights management: allows data to be public domain, under Creative Commons, or shared via local “use policies” such as non-commercial only.
Knowledge stewardship: supports community-led peer review for small or specialist domains that fall outside general Wikimedia governance.

Examples

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space integrates recordings, images, and linguistic data for Livonian, Võro, Seto, and Mari communities.
The hudobnadatabaza.sk aims to provide access to all music ever made in Slovakia, weather in print sheets loanable in libraries, webshops in CD or sheet format, or song streaming on Spotify.
The Wikimuseum exhibition model allows GLAM institutions and citizen scientists to co-curate collections without physically moving artefacts.

Simple cultural objects, like photographs can be licensed with simple, standardised license statements, music, video recordings of events may have a bundle of rights that need more careful modelling. There is a lot more than CC-BY-SA to opening up open culture for wide audiences.

Next Steps

Align our Wikibase Ontology with the Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force to provide better mapping of cultural objects, permissions, duties and rights related to their use.
Improve our exchange mechanism with Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
Design better quality checks for the data.

Livestream recording

You can watch the presentation here:

Brace for Impact: Trustworthy AI for Good

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:15:00 +0000

At ImpactFest 2025, Reprex joined the expert session “Brace for Impact: Trustworthy AI for Good.”
The discussion explored how knowledge graphs and open, interoperable data can empower AI and data-driven applications that serve both public good and private innovation.
This continues our long-term collaboration with ImpactFest, where Reprex won the Audience Prize in 2022.

Key Idea

Data is only as powerful as it is trustworthy. Reprex promotes the use of knowledge graphs to connect open and proprietary data in transparent, reproducible ways that benefit both business and society.

Next Steps

Develop responsible AI applications built on shared, standards-based data.
Expand partnerships with European innovators in open and trustworthy data ecosystems.

WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:00:00 +0200

14:30–15:00 Our presentation took place in the session
GLAM Cooperation and Community Exhibitions at Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2025 in Thessaloniki.

We invite Wikimedia communities, data curators, AI specialists, GLAM partners, and digital humanists to join us in building a multilingual, interoperable Wikimuseum and extending the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space.
👉 Read more about this data sharing space

Our talk introduced the Wikimuseum concept: collaborative, multilingual exhibitions that bring together museum objects, archival documents, photographs, and private collections into Wikimedia-powered virtual showcases. As a case study, we presented the Livonian garment exhibition, where dispersed artefacts from Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were digitally reunited for the first time in a century.

We also showed how this approach interlinks with the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space (FUDSS), a demonstration of a rather complex system built around open knowledge graphs and a showcase of a particularly challenging data governance and curation use case involving FAIR and SAFE standards, different jurisdictions, rarely used languages.

Our federated Wikibase-driven dataspace designed for small, endangered, or diasporic heritage communities. The DSS applies the European Interoperability Framework to cultural data, connecting CIDOC-CRM museum records, DCTERMS library metadata, and Wikibase lexemes, while respecting local epistemologies and multilingual vocabularies.

Highlights

How joint Wikimedia exhibitions allow GLAM institutions and citizen scientists to co-curate without moving artefacts physically.
How multilingual Wikibase lexemes and semantic interoperability support endangered languages like Livonian, Võro, and Mari.
How a Wikibase Suite and Lexeme can provide for an alternative incubator for small communities with modern AI support.

The Wikimuseum Livonian clothing exhibition demo: Traditional Livonian Clothing

Next steps

Extend the Livonian and Seto exhibitions with more garments, and photographs.
Extend our music collections and publish ethnomusicologically relevant datasets.
Align the Wikimuseum model with the ECCCH Heritage Digital Twin Ontology.

Livestream recording

You can watch our presentation here, with two of us slightly pale with the virus that went around in the conference rooms:

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:00:00 +0200

Join us on 12 September 2025 at the House of Hungarian Music, Budapest for a hands-on workshop on how small labels, music libraries, and private collectors can connect their catalogues and archives to the new Open Music Europe / OpenMusE data sharing space.

We will show how the Slovak and Hungarian music data spaces — federated through the Open Music Observatory — make it easier to:

Share and repair metadata across archives, libraries, labels, and streaming platforms
Use identifiers (ISRC, ISWC, VIAF, etc.) to improve visibility and royalty distribution
Manage voluntary deposits and digital surrogates for private collections
Connect local catalogues to international platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Wikidata, MusicBrainz

Who should attend?

Independent and small labels seeking better visibility in digital distribution
Music libraries and archives aiming for cross-platform metadata integration
Private collectors interested in digitising and sharing their holdings responsibly

Why attend?

Learn how open-source tools like Wikibase make metadata sharing affordable and sustainable
Discover how services such as Unlabel help bring hidden catalogues into global circulation
Network with peers from Hungary, Slovakia, and beyond who face similar challenges

The event language is Hungarian, with support available in English. Further reading: A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei; Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

Practical details

📅 Date: Friday, 12 September 2025
📍 Location: House of Hungarian Music, Városliget, Budapest
🕑 Time: 10:00–16:00 (followed by informal networking)

Participation is free, but registration is required as places are limited. The language of the event is Hungarian. We appreciate if you write on the registration form a few sentences about what you collect, what type of collections you manage, and what is your primary interest.

👉 Register here (link to be added)

Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article demonstrates how dress history and textile-related research can be enhanced through the interoperability of knowledge provided by a knowledge graph. The growing availability of digital cultural and historical data is not matched by a similar increase in their usability. Therefore, expanding the search radius to collections across disciplines and countries requires harmonisation and interoperability of knowledge. Reprex has created TextileBase – a knowledge base fully interoperable with libraries, archives, museums, the open knowledge system Wikidata, and open science repository systems. The article highlights key considerations when formulating searches and addressing terminology dissimilarities to ensure that data providers working across country, language, or disciplinary boundaries understand the intended meaning. To improve and streamline searchability in libraries for textual sources mentioning relevant historical garments, archives for their contemporary depictions, and museum collections for new artefacts, TextileBase transforms data and metadata into knowledge statements, links terms to an international controlled vocabulary, and carefully compares the works of various research and collection institutions.

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:45:00 +0200

How can music library services be modernized to compete with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music Classical? How can we make it easy for music students, educators, amateurs, or professional musicians to find the sheet music of a piece that interests them? And how can schoolchildren explore the music of their town or region—with the help of local musicians, teachers, or librarians—given the limited financial resources of university and public libraries worldwide?

Our tools are open-source and free to test, and we are happy to support those interested in exploring them. We are also planning a meetup in Budapest at the end of August or beginning of September to discuss these ideas further with IAML Hungary members.

🇭🇺 Olvasd magyarul el ezt a bejegyzést - Hungarian version of this post.

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex, originally presented at the IAML 2025 Congress alongside librarian Anna Mester and Anna Žilková, head of IAML Slovakia. Their presentation and poster explored the legal, organizational, and information science aspects of the data-sharing infrastructure behind the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb). A year earlier, the Hungarian professional community encountered this work at the Networkshop 2024: Digital Transformation of Education, Research, and Public Collections conference, in the talk and paper titled A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei [Opportunities for Federating the Slovak Data Exchange Space in Hungary].

At the IAML Congress, we invited international partners to test, critique, and help develop a live demo service. Thanks to Salzburg’s geographical and cultural proximity, we were joined by many Hungarian colleagues.

The Reprex team is explaining our collaborative work to music metadata experts in Salzburg. Photo: Anna Žilková.

Our project’s ambitious goal is to make all music created within the territory of present-day Slovakia accessible through a semantic database. This includes a user-friendly graphical interface for individuals and API access for libraries and other institutions. The database connects known works and their variants, manuscript and published scores, and demo, archival, and commercial recordings. It also links composers and performers to secondary sources in libraries and archives that provide musicological context.

In Slovakia, we are integrating materials from the Music Fund, the Slovak Music Centre, and the SOZA database (sister organization to Artisjus). This enables us to substantially improve the data quality of public music library catalogues, which often lack detailed, work-level descriptions of scores. Metadata is frequently incomplete, outdated, or even incorrect. For example, a catalogue may refer to a composer’s “collected works” or “selected sonatas,” but rarely indicate which edition contains a particular sonata or movement a listener may have just encountered on a streaming playlist.

Our poster presented by Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Žilková (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 on IAML 2025. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Our Salzburg presentation explored key questions:

How does data governance work between private and public organizations—such as between a rights management society or streaming platform and a university or public library?
How can we reduce redundant workflows through data exchange?
How can deeper, semantically enriched search improve music library services?
What transferable insights from information and library science can help libraries, archives, museums, and private actors mutually improve their data?
The development of this system is supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, through the Open Music Europe project. Our aim is to offer a federated, decentralized alternative to the centralized but never built European Music Observatory model—one that builds on existing national, regional, and pan-European data systems in a networked way and leaves data ownership and control in place following the subsidiarity principle.

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

If you care about interoperability, cultural equity, and the future of library relevance in the streaming era—this is your moment to get involved.

Missed IAML2025?
👉 Presentation
👉 Poster
👉 Please contact us directly to try out our system.
👉 Blogpost about the wider context of our work, relevant for IAML, not only national chapters and invidivual members.

TextileBase: Introduction

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:00:00 +0200

The July 10 is a hybrid event that you can attend either in person or online. Please register via the contact form or via email. For those who cannot visit this event, we offer an alternative online webinar. (Please fill out your availability here). The start time is 15.00 Central European Summer Time, 14.00 GMT and 16.00 EET. If you physically attend, please arrive a few minutes early.

We warmly invite colleagues, friends, and stakeholders interested in cultural heritage data, digital humanities, and AI-supported research to a light and lively summer seminar on three interconnected initiatives.

Our main focus is on TextileBase – our linked open data platform for dress history
We show a glimpse of our futuristic multi-modal, multi-language graph with data, images, music, audiovisual Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, as a way to connect clothing history into a broader regional knowledge platform.
And the Wikimuseum concept for wider impact, co-curated collections and exhibitions.

This informal gathering is not about theoretical publications (although we’re happy to send you preprints!). It’s about showcasing how things actually work, especially when archival depth is shallow and data quality is mixed. There’s a big difference between writing about data integration in a computer lab — and actually building tools that work for researchers and cultural institutions across languages, countries, and platforms.

Topics For Discussion

Each speaker will present a short, live demo or walkthrough (10–12 minutes), followed by Q&A and a casual hybrid meet-up.

Daniel Antal: What is TextileBase? Connecting knowledge across museums, archives, libraries, repositories, Europeana, ECCCH, Wikidata.

Anna Márta Mester: Technical, but not Deep Dive: Using the Wikibase Suite, SPARQL endpoints, and Sampo-UI for comfortable scholarly research.

Ieva Pigozne: Use Case: From years to weeks — how Latgalian data curation paved the way for rapid digitisation of Seto and Livonian datasets. Sneak peek: Finno-Ugric clothing.

Kata Gábor: AI for Cultural Heritage: From multilingual NLP to image annotation and ontology enrichment in noisy or sparse data environments.

Asmah Federico: WikiMuseum: A vision for co-curated, multilingual virtual exhibitions with dispersed physical collections.

Wikibase Interfaces

Entry examples from Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region, from right to left: Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181.

In machine-readable format: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q180.ttl

SPARQL Endpoint

We will place here a few sampe querries:

Latgalian Garments Dataset

Sampo UI

We are going to unveil a similar interactive website on the webinar to the OperaSampo; TextileBase will run on Sampo, following dozens of successful digital humanities projects.

TextileBase

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 10:40:00 +0200

Press `F` on your keyboard

Enter full screen mode: on your keyboard

Full screen: F or Overview: Esc
forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

TextileBase https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/index.php?title=Main_Page
Single item: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Item:Q142
RDF: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q180.ttl or change the .ttl to .json, .jsonld, .nt.
Experimental Semantic browser http://135.181.91.51:3006/en/garments/faceted-search/table?page=0 (may need incognito mode, not “safe” yet, but not harmful to your computer.)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0200

16:00–17:30 Our presentation takes place in the session of Music Libraries of Tomorrow: Reaching out to Wider Audiences at the Mozarteum University E.001 HS Thomas Bernhard room.

We want invite IAML members—national libraries, regional centres, municipal collections, and independent music librarians—to join us in building a federated, decentralised European Music Observatory. 👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Our presentation at IAML 2025 introduces the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb), a national pilot within Open Music Europe. It offers a pragmatic, scalable solution to a widespread challenge: aligning metadata from libraries, archives, rights organisations, and digital distributors without centralisation or heavy infrastructure.

Built on the European Interoperability Framework, SKCMDb creates a legal, semantic, and organisational bridge between institutions like the Slovak Music Centre, SOZA, and public libraries, while also integrating with global platforms like Wikidata and MusicBrainz. We show how library records, music rights data, and streaming metadata can be reused and enriched across systems—supporting discoverability, legal compliance (like local content quotas), and better access to Slovak music.

This presentation will be especially valuable for professionals working in metadata curation, authority control, and digital service design, and those seeking low-cost, high-impact pathways to public-private interoperability in cultural heritage.

Please visit our poster and talk with our team members, Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Zilkova (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 10:30–11:00 in the Gallery. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Check out the entry examples related to Albrecht’s: Missa in C (printed, Hudobné centrum) with library and webshop access points, and linked data on the composition itself Q479, linked to its recorded manifestations.

Next steps

The Slovak pilot illustrates how libraries and national music centres can take a central role in a decentralised European Music Observatory that federates with the EU Open Data Portal, Europeana, ECCCH, DARIAH, and Zenodo. This poster accompanies a companion contribution on the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, including the LīvMDb (Livonian Music Database), which explores how smaller regional repertoires can be embedded in broader, multimodal cultural graphs—advancing the vision of a European Music Observatory as a complement to the European Cultural Heritage Cloud.

Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:45:00 +0200

Across Europe, music libraries are under pressure: greater expectations for digital services, growing metadata burdens, and increasingly fragmented infrastructure. At the same time, vital parts of our musical heritage—especially regional or minority repertoires—remain hidden from search, discovery, and policy.

Please meet us at 👉 IAML2025 in Salzburg on 7 or 8th July. Our presentation takes place in the session of Music Libraries of Tomorrow: Reaching out to Wider Audiences at the Mozarteum University E.001 HS Thomas Bernhard room on 7 July 2025, 16:00–17:30. The day after you can meet us in the Gallery for the poster session.

We initiated the Open Music Europe project, because we believe that in the music ecosystem, data centralisation always fails, and a new kind of cooperation is needed—one that respects local control while enabling international reuse.

Our Slovak pilot, the SKCMDb, connects libraries, music centres, rights organisations, and platforms through a shared metadata backbone based on open ontologies. Built as a national data sharing space, it enables coordinated cataloguing and discovery across public and private systems—from streaming services and printed scores to CD loans and digital archives.

But we also know that cultural and music policy is not only national. It is often regional, local, or community-based. That’s why we follow the principle of subsidiarity: letting decisions and innovation happen at the lowest competent level, close to the collections and communities themselves.

Our Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, including the LīvMDb (Livonian Music Database), shows how even the smallest communities—without formal cultural infrastructure—can take part in high-quality metadata production and digital discovery. We provide the tools and models to empower local custodians, in their language, on their terms, and without the need for large institutional support.

Please check out the demo version of the Finno-Ugric Dataspace or read the long-form project description.

Now we invite IAML members—national libraries, regional centres, municipal collections, and independent music librarians—to join us in building a federated, decentralised European Music Observatory. One that reflects Europe’s diversity. One that reduces data curation costs and improves visibility. One that connects music libraries with the open data and open science infrastructures already transforming other sectors.

Our platform is open-source, built on FAIR principles and the European Interoperability Framework. We use tools like Wikibase, Blazegraph, Sampo-UI, and R—packaged to work for libraries with limited technical capacity.

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

If you care about interoperability, cultural equity, and the future of library relevance in the streaming era—this is your moment to get involved.

Not present at IAML2025?
👉 Presentation
👉 Poster
👉 Please contact us directly.

Let’s ensure music libraries remain vital entry points to Europe’s rich and evolving cultural soundscape.

Metadata Groundhog Day: What a Moribound Language Can Teach Spotify and Shopify

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:45:00 +0200

And if you want to fix these errors, you may find that you are back to the Data Sisyphus.

When you build systems in the cloud, or in your local architecture, at one point you will realise that naming things — places, people, products — or updating their whereabouts is probably the most time-consuming, most expensive, and most error-prone workflow.

In this blogpost, we want to talk about what seems like the easiest part of a location: the name of the city, town, or village.

Mazirbe Is Missing Again

We recently built a multilingual gazetteer — essentially a reconciled database of place names — for a tiny stretch of the Livonian coast in Latvia. At first glance, this might seem like a project rooted deeply in the digital humanities.

But here’s the twist: the very same problems we tackled here are the ones plaguing the music industry, global e-commerce platforms, and enterprise software stacks.

This is Gross-Irben 👉 Lielirbe / Īra / Irben / Suur-Irben 👉 Familiar with RDF: see in TTL; Klein-Irben will be near Gross-Irben, and Irē is almost Īra!

Mazirbe is a small, big place. It definitely exists, and it is the cultural center of a small nation: the Livonians. Yet, when you are looking for clothing, music, or photographs that should come from Mazirbe in a relevant database, you often find nothing. Not even the place.

But Mazirbe exists!

Depending on the record, it might appear as:

Mazirbe (Latvian) • Irē (Livonian) • Мазирбе (Russian) • Klein-Irben (German) • Suur-Irben (Finnish-German hybrid) • Мазирбе (Russian) • Mazirbė (Lithuanian)

Meyer‘s Zeitungsatlas 050 – Russland- Gouvernement Sankt Petersburg, Esthland, Liefland, Kurland

This kind of variation isn’t just a cultural footnote — it breaks databases, mismatches search results, and silently corrupts analytics.

If you’re in music metadata, this is your “JAY Z” vs. “Jay-Z” vs. “Shawn Carter” problem.

If you’re in e-commerce, it’s “Red Crewneck XXL” vs. “Crewneck, crimson, 2XL”.

Same data structure. Same unresolved chaos.

A Gazetteer That Works Like Real Life

We created a semantic, multilingual, multiscript gazetteer for the Livonian coast. Each place entry includes:

All known name variants across time, languages, and scripts
Structured links to global authority services (Wikidata, VIAF, GeoNames)
Canonical IDs, multilingual labels, and machine-readable formats (RDF, TTL, etc.)
Context about administrative boundaries, historical changes, and source provenance

Try us:

👉 Mazirbe / Irē / Klein-Irben / Мазирбе / Mazirbė 👉 Familiar with RDF: see in TTL

We published it using Wikibase — the same technology that powers Wikidata. It’s not just a spreadsheet; it’s a small, dynamic knowledge graph.

And we also put it into BlazeGraph, so you can find all these villages — and also the music, the clothing, or photographs that come from them.

So What?

Here’s why this matters outside the northern shores of Kurzeme, or beyond the borders of Latvia:

In global supply chains, location names and vendor names drift constantly. While country boundaries are relatively stable, subnational boundary changes — counties, parishes, provinces, municipal borders — happen thousands of times per year, even within Europe.
In streaming metadata, artists get duplicated, misspelled, or transliterated inconsistently. It’s not unusual to find dozens of same-named artists in a distributor’s or rights manager’s roster.
In CRM systems, customers have multiple entries because of one diacritic. Irē becomes Ire if the user didn’t have ē installed.
In museum heritage databases and webshops, items disappear because their place of origin changed names three times since the accession record was created.

Our little example was created to accompany a digital humanities publication, but it’s not just a “humanities” problem. It’s a cross-sector, multilingual, historical, bureaucratic, data problem.

And we’re all living in it.

Lessons We Took Away

Don’t fight ambiguity. Model it.
Linked data models (RDF, Wikibase) handle aliases and variants with elegance.
Small, local, curated vocabularies can scale conceptually to global systems.
Top-down standardization fails in diverse data ecosystems — context wins.

See It / Fork It / Repurpose It

You can explore the full Livonian Gazetteer here:

Web UI: https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Main_Page
RDF example: https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Special:EntityData/Q4429.ttl
Also check out our TextileBase project — same model, but for 19th-century Latvian shirts and skirts

If your stack includes messy location names, user-generated labels, non-English content, or legacy records — maybe this can help.

And if you feel like you’ve seen this movie before… you have.

It’s Data Sisyphus all over again.

👉 https://reprex.nl/post/2021-07-08-data-sisyphus/

The Concept of a WikiMuseum

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:20:00 +0100

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Building Blocks

Wikimuseum: exhibitions, example: Estonian, English and our developing cross-country, cross-institutional exhibition prototype.
The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space: description, Wikibase.
Our presented solution and sample virtual exhibitions will be finalised in July-August 2025.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Our building blocks: Vikipeedia:GLAM and the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

TextileBase

Sun, 11 May 2025 15:05:10 +0100

TextileBase is a platform to collect, connect, and share knowledge about historical clothing.
It links artefacts, photographs, secondary sources, and institutional records into a multilingual, interoperable, and searchable knowledge graph.

By bringing together scattered records from museums, archives, researchers, and businesses, TextileBase enables richer stories about how people dressed, lived, and expressed themselves.

Why Textiles?

Unlike stone or metal, textiles are fragile. Few garments survive beyond a century. What we know often comes from dispersed museum pieces, old photographs, or drawings — often in different languages and formats.

TextileBase connects these fragments into one network: a living map of dress history.

Who is TextileBase for?

Museums & archives — link dispersed collections into larger platforms such as Europeana and ECCCH.
Researchers & cultural heritage projects — manage data to FAIR/8-star standards, publish reusable datasets, data papers, and visualisations.
Businesses — from sustainable fashion to cultural tourism, TextileBase supports digital product passports, provenance tracking, and heritage storytelling.

Connect artefacts, images, and texts into one collaborative, AI-supported research space.

👉 Build on shared knowledge: Technical details & offering

TextileBase is not only about preserving the past — it’s about making data usable now, for research, heritage, and innovation.

Examples from the Database

Connecting dispersed artefacts: 19th-century Latgalian garments in one linked dataset (Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181).

Connecting Artefacts Across Borders

Understanding Secondary Sources

Enriching records with secondary sources: trousers identified from a 1913 Seto photograph (Q331).

Following Shifting Place Names

Tracing shifting place names: a Livonian skirt recorded under Finnish, German, Livonian, and Latvian toponyms (Q347).

Building a Wikimuseum for Dispersed Collections

Inspired by Wikimedia Estonia’s multi-language, open-access model, we propose a virtual museum—a Wikimuseum—that brings together:

Artefacts from rural museums (e.g., Mõniste, Saatse, Värska)
Items in national museums (Estonia, Finland, Hungary)
Private collections that would never be physically exhibited together

Building a Wikimuseum: connecting dispersed collections across languages, borders, and institutions. See early prototype: Seto Traditional Clothing.

👉🏿 Preview Presentation The Concept of a WikiMuseum: WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space press F for full-screen view (to be presented at WikimediaCEE 2025 in Thessaloniki.)

Next Steps

👉🏻 Visit the TextileBase website

👉🏾 Subscribe (PDF)

👉🏼 Get in touch

Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 17:00:00 +0100

Entry examples from Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region, from right to left: Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181.

The first published dataset, Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region contains data on Latvian traditional shirts and skirts from the Latgale region in Eastern Latvia. The The female and male shirts, and the skirts in the dataset are handmade and were worn in the 19th century. They represent both festive and daily wear of the local female and male peasants. The shirts are stored at the National History Museum of Latvia and the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia. The data contain information on the locality of their origin, their approximate date of creation with various precisions, the materials they are made of, and the way of their fabrication, as well as their purpose of wearing (festive or daily wear) and wearer’s ethnicity and gender. They also include the name of the museum each shirt is stored at, supplemented with its unique inventory number. Data on some sample shirts also include a photo of the shirt.

Check out the properties (relations) in the data model: ListProperties
See every entry in the database: All items

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 10:30:00 +0200

We started experimenting with the legal, organisational, semantic and technical challenges of creating a genuinely trustworthy, AI-supported data-sharing space that can find and connect tangible and intangible elements of the Finno-Ugric cultural universes. We were also seeking a better governance model for oversight for the custodians of these endangered, shrinking universes in their language and with little technical knowledge, partly as alternatives to the established Wikipedia to the open knowledge incubation method for small linguistic minorities.

Meet up with some of our team members, Daniel Antal, Britt-Kathleen Mere, Ieva Pigoze, Bogáta Tímár, and Ieva Vīvere during the conference, and do not forget to check out our presentation at the LP05 Session, Digital Insights in Cultural Research, on Mar 6, 2025 10:30 AM — 11:00 AM, or meet up with Kata Gábor and Dániel Antal in Paris, Anna Mester and Mihály Nagy in Budapest in subsequent workshops.

Read more or take a look at our conference poster below:

Download the poster in pdf

See our presentation made in the DNBH 2025 conference in Tartu:

What are the competencies of the system that we are building?

Please check out the demo version of the Finno-Ugric Dataspace or read the long-form project description.

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:30:00 +0200

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Click through: data and playlists.

Questions?

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LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:40:00 +0100

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space is a research-driven data sharing space for reconnecting fragmented cultural heritage across languages, institutions, and countries. Developed with minimal resources as a curatorial and technical experiment, it combines semantic web technologies with participatory methods to make underrepresented Finno-Ugric cultures visible and reusable in contemporary digital infrastructures.

Rather than building a new repository, the project demonstrates how multilingual metadata, community-driven annotation, and lightweight governance models can enable cultural reconstruction and long-term interoperability in low-scale heritage ecosystems.

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:30:00 +0100

Today, most music is recommended by algorithms—not only to subscribers of platforms like YouTube and Spotify, but also to radio editors, concert promoters, and festival organisers. This shift has led to the conclusion that collective management organisations (CMOs) and music information centres (MICs) must modernise their metadata and publishing practices to remain visible and competitive in the digital age.

Using advanced data enrichment techniques, our platform helps ensure that these institutions have the most accurate, 360° view of the repertoire they represent. We also ensure that digital streaming services and search engines are updated with precise, reliable, and machine-readable musical metadata.

See our presentation made in the IAMIC 2024 conference in Vienna:

Our goal is to ensure that MICs and CMOs maintain the most up-to-date information about musical works. Whenever data is missing or outdated, we retrieve it from authoritative sources and deliver it automatically into their systems—ready for review by human curators.

We aim to make all music in Slovakia visible across global music discovery platforms, encyclopaedias, Europeana, and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. This includes helping users locate sheet music for sale or loan, as well as showing where each piece can be heard—whether via streaming, radio, or public archives.

To achieve this, we provide:

We want to ensure that a MICs and CMOs have the most accurate information about music. Whenever data is missing or new information has yet to reach their database, we try to look up the data from reliable sources and ensure that it arrives automatically in their system (to be reviewed by a knowledgeable human curator).
Make all music in Slovakia visible on all global music systems, encyclopaedia, Europeana and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. Enable people to locate sheets of works for sale or public lending and show where people can listen to the music in various formats.
Provide the information in a dual format: enable a MIC to provide machine-readable, standardised, RDF annotated data to directly support the recommender systems of Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and other platforms.
Provide CMOs with a framework to make their members more visible to digital streaming platforms by enrichment, control and processing of available metadata and to also inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content, thus promoting local CMO members.

Read more or take a look at our conference poster below:

Download the poster in pdf

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 (#WMCEE) is an annual conference centered on Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia and other related projects) in countries of Central and Eastern Europe (more recently, also in Central Asia). It features presentations on Wikimedia projects, other wikis, free/open source software, free knowledge and free content, and these topics’ social and technical aspects.

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

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What we actually do?

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

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Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

This presentation will be made in the Hungarian language. A similar presentation in English is available here.

Vajon miért nem ajánl a Spotify híres ajánlórendszere Szlovákiában szlovák embereknek elég szlovák zenét? És miért akadoznak az egyébként is nem kielégítő számú meghallgatások után a kifizetések? Ezek voltak azok a kérdések, amelyekre a Szlovák Művészeti Tanács kis összegű ösztöndíjával, a state51 támogatásával a Reprex és a SOZA válaszokat kezdett keresni 2020-ban. Azok az adatproblémák, amelyek a nem kielégítő eredményekre vezetnek, nem csak Szlovákiában, hanem lényegében minden kisebb nyelvterületen jelen vannak.

A Szlovák Zenei Adattér egy Horizon Europe programban finanszírozott mintaprojekt, amelyben különböző közgyűjteményi és magán jogkezelői adatok és metaadatok összekapcsolására kerül sor. Az adatkapcsolás jogi, szervezési és szemantikai megoldásai a zenei területtől függetlenül hasznosíthatók különböző jogi státuszú könyvtári-, levéltári-, múzeumi és magán adatbázisok összekapcsolására.

Az előadás célja kettős volt: egyrészt szeretnénk olyan zenei adattulajdonosokat találni, akik láthatóbbá és használhatóbbá szeretnék tenni a gyűjteményeiket Magyarországon. A másodlagos cél az előadásban bemutatott nyílt forráskodú technikák és nyílt adatok kulturájának a terjesztése Magyarországon.

ELTE Digital Heritage Meetup

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

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Dataweek²⁴: Data-driven Compliance with the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:22:00 +0100

All slides

This is a lightly edited version of the presentation at the Data-driven and Automated Compliance section of Dataweek²⁴ Event page.

It has often been said that ESG reporting is a data problem. If you want to fulfil the new requirements set by the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive, which is a legal act that changes European laws on financial accounting and its audit or assurance, you will encounter a very serious data linking and integration problem. If you have such sustainability bookkeeping, you must be able to factually link your financial accounts to your environmental and social accounts. In simple terms, if you expense the cost of 1 MW of electricity, then you cannot calculate the footprint of 0.98 MW in your sustainability report.

All slides

ESG introduces two related challenges, which are best addressed by explicit knowledge bases, enterprise graphs connected to open knowledge graphs, and data sharing spaces.

The company must be able to collect data and report on other companies and things that happen outside of the boundaries of the company or company group. Such a practice had been in place in some heavily regulated industries; for example, the food industry had to bear a qualified responsibility over the entire food supply chain or the nuclear industry for the lifecycle of the fossile fuels.
The company must also be able to curate trustworthy data about entirely new domains: data about the natural or ecological environment, such as data on biodiversity, recycling, water; and data about the social environment, for example, indicators about affected communities, workers in the supply chain or end users.

Joining a data sharing space is a good solution because the new data requirements are not one-time data upgrades but require a permanent data connection with the ecological and social environment. A company and its ERP system or its key performance management users cannot import new data, such as metadata of the EU Taxonomy regulation, and call it a day. Data curation must be an ongoing activity.

All slides

Most companies import relatively little data regularly, and therefore, they have little experience in data curation, i.e., the art of organising, annotating, and integrating data collected from various sources in a way that is presentable in the form of indicators or can be reused later. Perhaps their bookkeeping needs to import foreign exchange rates regularly if they export or import in their activities. Data curation will become an ongoing activity if they start to monitor and measure the environmental and social environment impacts of their actions.

So, if we agree that joining a data sharing space, i.e., an organisation that has pre-agreed terms and conditions on sharing and exchanging data, with pre-agreed terminology or vocabulary (“semantics”) and technology, the question is, what kind of data sharing organisation is the most appropriate?

The CSRD Directive has industry-agnostic elements, which must be fulfilled in every company, and industry-specific elements, which are being developed as we speak. For example, we work mainly with music and film production, both of which belong to the Media and Entertainment Group, which must apply the same industry-specific variations of the European Sustainability Development Standards. We think that the best is to create industry-specific data sharing spaces, such as the famous Data 4.0 for manufacturing, but allow them to be federated and to exploit further synergies: there are plenty of financial, economic, social or environmental data that are used by other existing data sharing spaces and it is not necessary to curate and produce them in, for example, a music or film-production oriented data sharing space.

Are for-profit and social enterprises technically ready to join data-sharing spaces? Not without help. While some large corporations have explicit knowledge bases and enterprise graphs, most smaller European enterprises do not necessarily have a distinct IT function. It is a simple relational database with a fixed schema if they manage databases. Bringing them on board requires simple systems and assistance.

All slides

Reprex is building a data sharing system, Reprexbase, which is built around Wikibase as a knowledge broker system. Wikibase is the open-source software that hosts Wikidata, the largest open knowledge graph in the world. We extend it with various ETL modules and an ecosystem of peer-reviewed statistical libraries to create scientifically correct impact indicators and benchmarks. These extensions are necessary not only because most enterprises are not familiar with working with linked data or graphs but also because Companies are usually familiar with creating financial indicators (for SMEs, simple accounting indicators, larger enterprises with a controlling function, and more complex indicators) but not with the creation of non-financial statistical indicators. The CSRD directive calls for reporting more than 200 indicators over five environmental and four social matter groups, which is more than a company would have on a balanced scorecard. Reliably producing so many indicators is no small feat.

Large and public companies are directly responsible for CSRD reporting, i.e., integrating financial, environmental and social accounting. They need to improve their bookkeeping or ERP systems because often they do not even organise into a database much of the contents of the current invoices (physical quantities, units), which would allow them to create the factual basis between energy cost, energy use and energy footprint, for example. However, they must ask their suppliers for further environmental and social data. Without readily applicable Digital Product Passports, this is a considerable cost, estimated at around 1500 euros per supplier. If you are a festival organiser or a film producer with hundreds of suppliers, this will quickly pay for a simple data sharing space; if you do it with a cluster in your industry, the costs can be significantly reduced.

Open Music Observatory

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0100

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Data Sharing Spaces for CSRD

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

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Dataweek²⁴: Introducing a new European music dataspace

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:30:00 +0100

Daniel Antal introduced on the part 2 of Data Week 2024 and LAILEC the Open Music Observatory, the subjective take of the Open Music Europe consortium on creating a European data observatory with the help of a modern, federated, decentralised data-sharing space that is interoperable with various EU digital services. The short presentation was held in the plenary session (16.00-18.00.)

At 14.00, in the Data-driven automated compliance session (Room Erasmus 3), Daniel spoke about the Sustainability and Innovation pillars of the music observatory in light of the complex compliance issues raised by the CSRD Directive and the difficult-to-access but favourable green financing and insurance opportunities open for the music, film, and another creative sector.

If you are participating in Data Week Part 2 or LAILAC, please join the presentation or have an informal chat at the social dinner. Thanks to KU-Leuven and the Big Data Value Association for the organisation and invitation.

Open Music Observatory: Towards a European Music Dataspace

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 17:00:00 +0100

Check out the full presentation here, or the forming observatory on music.dataobservatory.eu.

Daniel Antal will introduce part 2 of Data Week 2024 and LAILEC, the Open Music Observatory, the subjective take of the Open Music Europe consortium on creating a European data observatory with the help of a modern, federated, decentralised data-sharing place that is interoperable with various EU digital services. The short presentation will be in the plenary session (16.00-18.00.)

At 14.00, in the Data-driven automated compliance session (Room Erasmus 3), Daniel will speak about the Sustainability and Innovation pillars of the music observatory in light of the complex compliance issues raised by the CSRD Directive and the difficult-to-access but favourable green financing and insurance opportunities open for the music, film, and another creative sector.

Hachaton, Registers for Cultural Entities

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

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From Slovakia Towards a European Music Dataspace

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

This presentation was made in the Hungarian language. A similar presentation in English is available here.

Hallgass hazai zenéket

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

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Lightning Talk About the Slovak Music Dataspace

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0100

This Lightning talk about the advantages of thinking in datas (sharing) spaces was made in Hungarian for the audience of Networkshop ‘24. For an English language introduction to the topic in the same context see Open Music Dataspace.

ESRS in the Film, Television & Music Industry

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:00:00 +0100

Save the date.

IDCC24 Lightning Talk Session

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:15:00 +0000

Open Music Europe is a Horizon Europe project that aims to build a working prototype of the planned European Music Observatory.

Interested in our automated data observatories? Let us meet in Edinburgh on the 18th International Digital Curation Conference and discuss who you could use our open-source, collaborative data infrastructure and know-how.

The EU, UN, or other international bodies have recognised or initiated at least 60 data observatories that carry out long-term data collection on various domains; we have not found any good policies or practices on how to place these observatories on data infrastructures that are interoperable towards open science and open government. We are creating a data management and governance model and a working MVP that coordinates data collection and statistical data production among scientific, private and official statistical actors.

Our most crucial pilot project wants to showcase a best practice for using privately-held data, i.e., data of music organisations and surveys carried out by scientific and business actors, to improve the quality of government statistics. We show how the guidelines on using private data as an ‘administrative data source’ and an ex-ante harmonisation of governmental surveys with open scientific surveys can result in high-quality datasets that fully complement the pre-existing official statistical products and commercial products.

As a coordination tool, we started developing a Data Management Plan to increase transparency from the outset. Apart from applying Horizon Europe’s OpenAIRE recommendations and FAIR requirements, we use the Open Policy Analysis Guidelines to bring open science transparency into the less standardised policy analysis area. We implement this following various UN/EU Guidelines on statistical production, creating a three-way reconciliation and interoperability, i.e., scientific research, public policy design and official statistics.

Click through to our working paper (available in PDF, epub, and html).

Our work contributes to sharing outputs earlier using Open Research platforms because we are building a framework supported by research automation that integrates open science, business, and official governmental data. We develop a software ecosystem complementing the R statistical environment and language, the lingua franca of official and scientific statistics, to make the data curation, pre-processing, processing, and eventual quality-controlled statistical data release open, transparent, and much timelier.

Our project follows an open collaboration framework that we design so that private music NGOs and enterprises, statistical offices and open science research groups can work together on the curation and design, production and release and use of data assets in the cultural domain. By opening the statistical infrastructure with our open-source production code and implementing the statistical data and metadata exchange standards simultaneously with other metadata standards and standardisation techniques like ex-ante and retrospective survey harmonisation, we hope to combine them in novel ways like never before while making them available sooner.

https://music.dataobservatory.eu/documents/open_music_europe/slovakia/slovak-cult-stat-pilot.html

Our showcase product will be a twin, linked open data resource: the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database. It will connect in unprecedented detail information about musical works and their sound recordings and notations in music libraries, heritage organisations and individual and collective rights management organisations. We will derive the Slovak Music Industry Registry from this linked open resource that we will convert into a structural business register satellite as an interface between the privately-held data of music management and music heritage institutions and the national/satellite account system of the Slovak Republic, particularly the Slovak Cultural and Creative Satellite Accounts.

Let’s get in touch if you are interested.

Stadslandbouw Den Haag

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 16:30:00 +0100

Ru Wikmann, the co-founder of BeeSage and our Reprex’s partner in piloting the Global Pollinators Observatory and looking for partners for our idea about building a knowledge system that employs millions of bees into monitoring the ecosystem and the downstream of many food value chains.

We would like to find partners for the Dependence of society and the economy on pollinators HORIZON-CL6-2024-BIODIV-01-3 call. For beekeeper and environmental organisations: concept note and for university research partners: CfR.

The film Together We Grow was supplied by The Hague residents and entrepreneurs platform Ons Eten in collaboration with the Food.Film.Fest. of Voedsel Anders. Urban Agriculture The Hague (Stadslandbouw Den Haag) and Ons Eten are both committed to raising awareness about our food system; what do we eat, how good is it for us, where does it come from, does the producer get a fair price, what is needed for production, what is the impact on nature, etc. The films of this festival make you think about these topics and show opportunities.

Let’s get in touch if you are interested.

MusicAIRE: Final Event

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

Are you participating in the final event of MusicAIRE? Do you want to talk with us about Listen Local, survey harmonisation for the music sector, or preparations for the CSRD Directive?

Let’s get in touch and meet up

More information soon.

Future Proof Film Production Data for Integrated ESG Reporting

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Click through to the presentation slides (available in PDF, epub, and html).

Daniel Antal presented the concept of Open Productions for producers and film professionals at the National Film Institute of Budapest, Europe’s largest film production cluster. Our planned project, which received one of the highest scores in the EIT CCI KIC’s Breakthrough Lab and received a conditional funding promise, aims to create an open, computer-actionable knowledge base to support the integration of film production budgeting, rights management, financial bookkeeping and accounting systems with environmental (CO2, H2O, waste, pollution, biodiversity risk map) and social sustainability data (workforce work-life balance, gender pay gap, etc.)

Let’s get in touch!

We are looking for film productions to test our system and report easier, cheaper and better the CO2, H2O, CH4 footprint, tackle their health and safety, gender paygap and royalty management problems.

Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

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Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

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Fényképeszek és műtermek adatai kutatóknak

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:30:00 +0100

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Kérdezzen: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Antal Dániel | Reprex

OpenProductions

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:30:00 +0100

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Semantic Enriching of The Historical Photo Collection

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:30:00 +0100

See the use case: Open Foto Ateliers

The slides are only available in the Hungarian language.

Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task?

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

Daniel Antal, as the co-founder of Reprex is honoured to be invited to the final event of the wonderful Creative FLIP program. Our Digital Music Observatory in many ways gained momentum from the CCS Ecosystems: Evidence-Driven CCI Policy & The Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report discussion in 2020, just before the terrible pandemic hit us all.

Blogpost for discussion: Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task? Creating a more flexible and useful business and occupational categorisations for the music and film industries.

More than two years have passed since Creative FLIP kicked-off a new project cycle, continuing to pursue its overall goal, to support a healthy ecosystem for the cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI). This is how we work – the launch of the online platform on status and working conditions of artists and cultural professionals is only one of many highlights to expect! Cruise along our flagship initiative, Creatives Unite, and discover its new look and tools, engage in discussions about the power of transformation policies, cross-sectoral cooperation, and platforms for peer exchanges. We will inquire if we should categorize CCSI occupations and why we need to talk about social inclusion, sustainability, greening and more transversal topics when discussing the future of the sector.

In this panel on the FLIP FORWARD Final Conference organised together with the CHARTER project (See: Factsheets: Families of competences pdf) we want to discuss the benefits but also the dangers of categorisation related to the self-image, the measurement, but also the visibility of the CCSI: categorisation enables a highlighting of similarities, but it also has the potential to exclude the unforeseen, the evolving, the fringes.

Our discussion will focus on cultural-creative occupations and be organised around the following questions:

To what extent do the categoriser’s viewpoint and goals shape the categories?
What are the limitations and dangers of categorising the occupational scope of the CCS?
Is it possible to develop an occupational categorisation of the CCS that serves all purposes? If not, how do you deal with this dilemma?

Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch.

Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task?

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 17:48:00 +0100

I am honoured to be invited to the final event of the wonderful Creative FLIP program. Our Digital Music Observatory in many ways gained momentum from the CCS Ecosystems: Evidence-Driven CCI Policy & The Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report discussion in 2020, just before the terrible pandemic hit us all. Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch and let us meet at the event.

It is one of our most fundamental cognitive abilities to identify shared features or similarities of objects, events, or ideas and then to group (“categorise”) these to make sense of the world. Without categorisation, learning, language, memory, and decision making (to name a few only) would be impossible. The production of cultural statistics also depends on categorisation, distinguishing what is to be measured and what is not.

Session: Categorizing CCS - an impossible task?

In this panel on the FLIP FORWARD Final Conference organised together with the CHARTER project (See: Factsheets: Families of competences pdf), we want to discuss the benefits but also the dangers of categorisation related to the self-image, the measurement, but also the visibility of the CCSI: categorisation enables a highlighting of similarities, but it also has the potential to exclude the unforeseen, the evolving, the fringes.

Our discussion will focus on cultural-creative occupations and be organised around the following questions:

To what extent do the categoriser’s viewpoint and goals shape the categories?
What are the limitations and dangers of categorising the occupational scope of the CCS?
Is it possible to develop an occupational categorisation of the CCS that serves all purposes? If not, how do you deal with this dilemma?

Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch.

One of the most fundamental problems of developing creative businesses in Europe and developing public policies to support them is that we have far less business and policy planning information available then any business in fruit farming, manufacturing of cars or providing banking services. Cultural statistics have a very low coverage in music or film. Indicators that an apple producer, a car component manufacturer or a bank supplier can take for granted, such as total or average gross value added in a country, employment, or wage statistics, do not exist.

The lack of statistical coverage makes it particularly difficult for such creative businesses and their industry organisations to comply with the expectations of the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive or participate in the advantages of green financing and the European Green Deal.

The production of statistics for the music or the film industry, like any other industry, relies on three fundamental categorisations:

the categorisations of economic activities that creative businesses and self-employed people do;
the categorisations of their products and services (such as films or sound recordings);
the categorisation of occupations and jobs available or filled with such occupations.

These categorisation do not work well in the cultural and creative sectors, and perhaps in some other services sector either.

To help small enterprises in music or film, we need different data collection and statistical or indicator production procedures and more flexible categorisation processes to support their business development on enterprise or a regional/national level. Photo: Jan Demiralp on Unsplash.

Why normal business and occupation categories fail to work in the creative sectors?

Unfortunately, these categorisations cannot be successfully applied in the music or the film industry for many reasons:

The entities are too small.
They have mixed activities.
They mainly employ people atypically without even checking their formal qualifications.

A small recording studio that works for films or the music industry, or a small company that offers stage or in-studio or on-set lightning typically employs people who learned their skills on the job; they often do various related activities, so their NACE code is not very characteristic. Also, because of their size, they hardly ever participate in governmental statistical surveys.

On a more fundamental level, in the creative industries, the dominant firm size is the microenterprise, where the management functions are usually not specialised and often not filled by people with business administration degrees: they do not have an HR department or even an HR function that would categorise their jobs; they do not have a management controlling system that would rely on a sophisticated bookkeeping or a well-categorised inventory of sales. This is what the International Labour Organization, or employment policymakers, describe as “informal enterprises”: they do not have formal internal structures, processes, and often even contracts that in larger enterprises enable a professional management of product, career, finances, or sustainability.

In Open Music Europe, building on a decade of experience at the Digital Music Observatory, we are using statistical processes and data innovation to serve the needs of the music industry by providing data on royalty collection, marketing, average artist remuneration, or gross value added. Our approach is based on innovative statistical procedures and recent regulatory changes that allow national statistical authorities to embrace them.

We do not have average musician remuneration statistics or gross value-added figures for music labels because even though musicians and record labels participate in the national statistical system, they are invisible as they do not have a clear category. The NACE categorisation system does not contain the activities of the “music industry”, only categories like “audiovisual” or “art performances” categories that mix up the numbers of the music industry with television, video production, or theatres. The same can be said of most occupations where music businesses employ workers or self-employed professionals. Even though they have a chance to participate in statistical surveys, which call upon a randomly selected list of small enterprises (in the case of business surveys) or people (in the case of the labour force surveys), they do not get an appropriate “musician” or “music business” label.

The categorisation or labelling of “performing arts” or “audiovisual” is unsuitable for a musician or filmmaker. If “audiovisual” average wages rise in a region, who are they supposed to know if this is due to outsourcing some film post/production to the region or an uptake in music recording activities? After all, film sound studios and music recording studios work for different markets and employ different people.

On the other hand, many creative industries know who belongs to their industry. Architects usually must fulfil severe qualification requirements and register into a local chamber of architects. Musicians must register with author’s and performer’s collective management societies if they want to receive copyright or neighbouring right royalties. If we can align such representative creative organisations with the statistical processes, we will get indicators that follow relevant categorisations for musicians, record labels or architects.

Several statistical and data innovations can make such an alignment or data coordination possible.

See: United Nations Guidelines on Statistical Business Registers pdf. European Business Statistics Methodological Manual for Statistical Business Registers. 2021 Edition.

Sample surveying, when musicians (as members of the working force) or their enterprises (as small businesses) are selected by a lottery to fill out a questionnaire, had been the most important source of official statistics between 1970 and 2010, but they are less and less used. Before the 1970s, we only had fewer statistics on full census-like questionnaires with no random sampling. In the last decade, we have seen more and more often that statistical offices directly connect to various “registers” or databases initially created for business or tax administration purposes to retrieve the data. Why ask a musician about her royalties if we can access her royalty account directly?

Why ask a musician about her royalties if we can access her royalty account directly? Accessing data that is available in a well-managed administrative source, such as a national royalty accounting system is cheaper, faster and more accurate.

From a royalty account, we can access more precise and timely information than from the memory of an artist.

In the last decade, UNECE and Eurostat have been the forerunners with several European national statistical offices in finding new ways to tap into so-called “privately held” registers, for example, the royalty accounts of copyright management societies, who have a full view of musicians in the country and precise and relevant information about their earnings, and indirectly about their employment or gross value added.

Economy of music in Europe: Novel data collection methods and indicators

In Slovakia, we are working out a process where the register and framework of the official data collection could be aligned with a private register set up by the music industry’s nationally representative stakeholders. Such a scheme would have many advantages both for the private and the public parties:

The collection of the statistical data would be faster, cheaper and more precise.
The data could be securely mapped to and from the NACE/ISCO categorisation used by the government and the relevant categorisations used by the music industry.
Whenever the music sector – a relatively minor part of the services business sector – would be under-sampled in a statistical survey methodology to produce reliable, music sector-specific data, additional, harmonised surveys or administrative data could ensure that minimum amount of music enterprise and musician data is present for quality-controlled statistical indicators.
The music businesses could professionalise their company planning HR processes, and, critically, have relevant benchmarks for environmental and social sustainability management; they could participate in the European Green Deal.

Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch!

Cover photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash.

Roundtable Discussions on Greening European Film Policy

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0200

Greening European Film Policy (GEFP) explores the burgeoning field of environmentally sustainable - ‘green’ - production in the European film industries. The project views green production as both an ethical proposition and a means to ensure the competitiveness of the European film industry - under which we include film, television, and streaming media. We position green production as a unique and as-yet unexplored competitive advantage for the film sector, where advanced development, embedding, and dissemination of green production practices is a crucial factor in maintaining the competitiveness, if not the very viability, of the European film industries.

GEFP focuses on mapping ongoing policy initiatives for green production and evaluate how the dynamics of top-down governance and horizontal policy and communication incentivise, deploy, and assess on-the-ground practice. We collaborate with key stakeholders across the UK and European green film and television sector, including policymakers, environmental consultants, production companies, and creatives to provide policy recommendations to incentivize a more sustainable sector.

Daniel Antal, CFA, was participating in the panel presentations and discussions on behalf of Reprex and presented the ideas behind the Eviota project.

The Budapest event was orgnanised by Dr Pietari Kääpä, University of Warwick, Policy Support Fund, Laurent, and GreenEyes Productions.

Questions for Film Funds and Policies

What are the current norms regarding funding and policy requirements around sustainability?
What challenges do you face in implementing or imposing sustainability policies?
Are there ways in which you might benefit from more communication or understanding of on-set experience from a sustainability POV?
Are there ways in which you might benefit from more regional or international collaboration, or is funding an inherently localized issue?
We mainly talked about sustainability from a production POV so far, where do you think featuring it as part of the storyline has relevance / potential? Is the film fund considering similar changes to what happened internationally (BFI, Eurimage etc.) where the funding applications require to elaborate on any planned sustainable practices?
What models do you think work well in other countries, that you think would be realistic to implement in the region and what is needed in order to implement it?

Adatterek

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:00:00 +0100

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LinkedIn: Antal Dániel | Reprex

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:30:00 +0100

The Eviota project aims to create sustainability reports connected to the financial accounts of companies, NGOs, and civil society actors. The first phase concentrates on greenhouse gases and air pollutants. We want to create reliable estimates of the carbon and other pollutants footprint of music-related (social) enterprises based on their spending (“connected financial and sustainability reporting”.)

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

16:30: Meet and greet
17:00: Short presentation
17:15: Discussion of your reporting

The discussion will be based on the accounting documents sent to us in advance. We will create a first version of a simplified sustainability report about your music or film company (for profit, or non-profit.) we will not share any financial information in the meetup, only visualizations of risk heatmaps, and common reporting and sustainability problems.

Why connect to your accounting software?

The accounting system already records all those economic events that may have an impact on how your company, directly or indirectly, causes greenhouse gas emissions, uses precious water, or may help to close (or, accidentally, widen) the gender pay gap.

As soon as the modification of the EU accounting directive take effect, you will have to connect your financial accounts to your sustainability reporting.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We start from the annual summary of supplier and buyer ledgers, or the trial balance that has this information.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries. It is easy to reconcile with US GAAP based documents.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity.

This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO - the case of the music and film industries

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 15:00:00 +0100

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Key Takaway for the CFO

"The basic accounting and reporting principle of materiality is extended. I need to keep an eye on accounts that have an economic, sustainability, or dual materiality."

Introduction 2. Our Approach 3. Case Studies with company reports 5. Main Features 4. Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting 5. Why are we developing it? 6. Is There a Film/TV Industry Version? 7. Questions

Introduction

Timeline

2019: European Green Deal and Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation.

2020: 2030 EU climate target (-55%); EFRAG to standardize connected financial and sustainability reporting (IFRS, GRI, SASB/IIRC, TCFD, WICI, UN).

2021: Strategy for financing the transition to a sustainable economy; CSRD announced (changes in EU accounting and audit law); Reprex Eviota concept based on our iotables 0.4.7, which was updated with environmental impact analysis.

2022: EU Taxonomy (“Climate Delegated Act” see: FAQ). Reprex Music Eviota with MusicAIRE and wins Hague Innovators Award Audience Prize; Horizon Europe Research & Innovation winner.

Future Timeline

2023: Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD); first 50,000 companies apply the new rules for the financial year 2024 (report in in 2025.) Investors, banks, insurance companies, granting organizations, corporate donors, even audiences want to see more and more proof of conducting sustainable business.

2024: CSRD for the first 50,000 companies.

2025: First mandatory connected reporting for 50,000 large companies and listed SMEs.

2026: The European Commission plans to extend the EU taxonomy to six environmental objectives and rules for about 50,000 companies by 2026. Many small companies will have to make mandatory disclosures and reporting.

Sustainability Reporting Architecture

Our approach

Cultural & Creative Sectors Industries Approach

Double Materiality

Our approach to data quality: do not waste time, energy, data curation/ingestion/acquisition on items that are likely immaterial, unless any significant information arises that they may become material in the future.

Case Studies

A38 is one of the world's premiere music venues. With more than 500 hundred events a year, and more than 50,000 hours of music documentaries and live streams recorded in its studios, it a powerhouse of European music in a converted Ukrainian icebreaker ship floating on the Danube. It won the Lonely Planet Best Bar global vote. Make sure to visit them if you are in Budapest.

GreenEyes Production is a Hungarian startup that helps international film production according to the UK and US sustainability management standards, and works with Reprex to build an EU-compliant tool. They work on large international productions in Budapest (the biggest film production hub in the EU), and Prague.

Passeum [not added yet] is a music ticketing company.

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

In 2020 the European Commission requested technical advice, mandating the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group, EFRAG, to undertake preparatory work for the elaboration of possible EU non-financial reporting standards in a revised EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive (i.e., harmonizing financial reporting and audit with connected sustainability reporting) within the framework of the European Green Deal sustainable finance package and the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive.

Ongoing Standardization

🖱 Link: EUROPEAN LAB – Project Task Force on Preparatory Work for the Elaboration of Possible EU Non-Financial Reporting Standards

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

CSRD/EFRAG Timeline in the EU

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Yes, it is coming! Ask for a demo on Email | Keybase | LinkedIn.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Data Observatory Labs

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 18:12:00 +0100

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Short Conceptual Video

WP Project Coordination

1. Reprex aims to coordinate this project with a dedicated, experienced Creative Europe project manager who is familiar with the music and audiovisual creation.

2. Because of the project size and subsidy rate (60%) every partner must contribute to financing WP Project Coordination in proportion to their effective subsidies.

WP Sustainability

Extend the usability of Eviota (a Scope 2-3 music ESG reporting tool) and GreenEyes (Scope 1 film ESG reporting tool) to work with music, film, books, and publishing.
Introduce these new methods to business school and vocational training courses.
Get regulatory approval to use in the context of the green finance package.

WP Survey Recycling

Utilize the survey harmonization and recycling tools developed in music to be available for film, television, photography, and book publishing users.
Extend harmonized question banks, and remove interoperability and semantic barriers to reuse data from previous audience and policy surveys for these CCSIs.
Subsidize the initial costs in use to transfer from non-reusable market research to reusable, collaborative market research.

WP Heritage Reuse

Utilize the best practices from music archives, film archives, and private photography archives to remove copyright law, ethical, interoperability, and semantic barriers to mix archival/heritage and new content in music, film, and photography (including in books.)
Create a special-purpose record label and audiovisual distributor that specializes in difficult, out-of-commerce/archival/commercial derivative work distribution on global streaming platforms.
Build a best practice for the legal and ethical public performance of derivative works that are made from archival/heritage (which were not deposited with the intent to be commercially used or widely circulated) and new creations.

WP AI & Big Data That Works For Everyone

Utilize the best practices from data feminism, music, and film distribution of niche, marginalized content, and create a general framework that reduces inequalities created by lower data representation (of women, small countries, small languages) that result in new injustice on algorithmic platforms. See publication.
Build new music, film, and photography information services that reduce the data imbalances, and make small language (for example, Estonian) or historically underrepresented (for example, female artists) more likely to be recommended by AI-driven algorithmic platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon.
Create open source solutions and open knowledge that enables small, independent music, documentary, photography, and book publishers to build audiences, and monetize content with big data and AI algorithms that work for everyone, not only male artists, English language content, and mainstream works.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Music Eviota

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:13:00 +0200

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Introduction 2. Our Approach 3. Main Features 4. Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting 5. Why are we developing it? 6. Is There a Film/TV Industry Version? 7. Questions

Introduction

Sustainability Reporting Architecture

Our approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Ongoing Standardization

🖱 Link: EUROPEAN LAB – Project Task Force on Preparatory Work for the Elaboration of Possible EU Non-Financial Reporting Standards

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

CSRD/EFRAG Timeline in the EU

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Yes, it is coming! Ask for a demo on Email | Keybase | LinkedIn.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Music Eviota

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:13:00 +0200

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Introduction 2. Our Approach 3. Main Features 4. Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting 5. Why are we developing it? 6. Is There a Film/TV Industry Version? 7. Questions

Introduction

Our approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Ongoing Standardization

🖱 Link: EUROPEAN LAB – Project Task Force on Preparatory Work for the Elaboration of Possible EU Non-Financial Reporting Standards

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Yes, it is coming! Ask for a demo on Email | Keybase | LinkedIn.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Create Datasets that are Easy to Combine and Reuse

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:09:00 +0100

The latest Reprex R package, dataset was released today on the Comprehensive R Archive Network. It is a very early, conceptual package that will help make scientific achievements more open, governmental data easier to find, and store information that can be better combined.

Data interoperability is almost a buzzword, yet we see very few comprehensive, good solutions to apply it. Try to find information on open government portals or on big open science repositories—apart from a few good examples, most datasets are as disorganized as any PC’s hard disk that is collecting dust in a shed.

The dataset package aims to bring together the best practices of data semantics, data organization, and the use of standard metadata to make sure that whatever you store in a data table, it will be immediately available for data analysis, activation, or combination in any new database.

Ambitious? It is, and dataset 0.1.9 is a very experimental product. While our other packages are aimed at intermediate users with a clear use case in mind, dataset at this point is aimed at package developers. Casual or even heavy R users are unlikely to download it as a standalone product. Instead, dataset aims to be a stable developer basis for our existing products, rOpenGov packages, and many new uses.

Download dataset

The metadata aim of dataset it to add standardized metadata to r data.frames, tibbles, data.tables and other similar structured, tabular objects. The organization and semantic objectives are to bring the tidy data concept closer to the datacube model, which is the basis of all statistical data exchanges, and W3C standards, which foster machine-to-machine data communications on the traditional web APIs and the semantic web.

Makes data importing easier and less error-prone;
Leaves plenty of room for documentation automation, resulting in far better reusability and reproducibility;
The publication of results from R following the FAIR principles is far easier, making the work of the R user more findable, more accessible, more interoperable and more reusable by other users;
Makes the placement into relational databases, semantic web applications, archives, repositories possible without time-consuming and costly data wrangling (See From dataset To RDF).

The first official release offers little immediate benefits. However, if you are an R package developer, we can bring you a few steps nearer to releasing your data products in a way that conforms the FAIR metadata principles. We can make a few steps to streamline your data wrangling. Make integration with relational databases easier. To make a step towards the semantic web.

Surveying Better Gender Diversity Within the Music Industry and Audiences

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:09:00 +0100

In this case study, we will collect responses in English and Italian among music professionals and fans on LineCheck, and compare their answers with 10,000s of answers from their countries, from other occupational groups, and other countries.

How to fill out this survey?

EN on Google Forms (will be our free tool)
IT su Google Forms (sarà il nostro strumento gratuito)
SurveyMonkey can be more suitable for more languages.

Table of Contents

What are the benefits of recycling and harmonizing surveys?

Surveyharmonies allows you to make more, bolder, and better-supported statements for your argument. Our technology vastly improves the quality and the inferential capacity of your surveys.

Retrospective survey harmonization means that your answers (we surveyed about 1500 music professionals in 2019) can be compared with other respondants (for example, the same questions asked in Eurobarometer from more than 30,000 people.)

Who we are asking?

We are asking music professionals in almost 100 artistic, technical or managerial roles. The way we form the questions make your answers comparable to the worlds largest database of musicians’ (anonymous) income and working condition database, and many non-music specific survey programs, such as Eurobarometer or the European Values Survey.

What are we asking?

We are asking questions that have been asked before. We created a small demonstration survey to show how we can better understand gender diversity in the music sector. We will anonymously record your answers, and connect them to the answers of more than 28,000 people who answered these questions earlier.

How to fill out this survey?

EN on Google Forms (will be our free tool)
IT su Google Forms (sarà il nostro strumento gratuito)
Both lanugages on SurveyMonkey (free for now)

In your opinion, are inequalities between women and men nowadays very widespread, fairly widespread, fairly rare or very rare in the country where you live?

This question was asked in the

Eurobarometer 82.4 survey

Eurobarometer 82.4: The European Parliament, Autonomous Systems, Gender Equality, and Smoking Habits, November-December 2014.

This means that we can compare what different occupational groups, men and women, different age groups answered to this question.

And within the music business or music non-profit sector of your country?

We are asking And within the music business or music non-profit sector of your country, are inequalities between women and men nowadays very widespread, fairly widespread, fairly rare, or very rare in the country that you chose (where you live and work?) to gain more insight about the potential differences within the music sector and the country where the music professional lives.

Works best if you use this from music professionals and non-music professionals in the same country.

In your opinion, in your country, in the year around 2030, do you think that …?

The image of women will be less stereotyped in the media (compare)
Men and women will earn the same pay (compare)
Men will take care of more household and family tasks (compare)
Women will be more represented among Heads of State and government (compare)
Women will be more present in traditionally masculine professions (compare
Acts of violence against women will have decreased (compare)
Women’s rights in developing countries will be better recognised (compare)

This question was asked in the

Eurobarometer 72.2 survey in 2009.

Eurobarometer 72.2: Nuclear Energy, Corruption, Gender Equality, Healthcare, and Civil Protection, September-October 2009.

This means that we can compare what different occupational groups, men and women, different age groups answered to this question. In 2009, 2030 was a long way many years ahead, but not any more. We could ask this question in two different ways again. We could ask what people think about 2040 to have a similar perspective, or re-ask how they think about 2030 which is only 8 years away by now.

See our earlier blogposts:

Reprex

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 15:42:00 +0100

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🌱 Eviota 🖱 click offers actionable insights into the supply chain of music businesses in the live, recording, and authors’ (copyright) stream.
🧾 We implement with Eviota the new reporting and accounting standards of EFRAG. We connect a reliable benchmark to every accounting item and make sure that your financial accounts contain your GHG footprint or even your contribution to equal pay for womxn. This will help you gain cheaper green loans, insurance, or green transition subsidies.


🎶 Surveyharmonies 🖱 click is our first experimental product that allows you to recycle surveys from all over Europe.
☑️ You ask questions about gender inequalities in many languages (try it EN IT and you get responses from your audience and more than 30,000 other people in various occupational groups all over Europe.
☿️ Join our pan-European gender inequality survey in January 2023.


♯ Listen Local is a 🖱 click trustworthy, ethical AI-powered system that aims to help great artists in small organizations and small countries using big data.
🎶 Our Listen Local Apps want to make sure that local ecosystems are not colonized by global platforms.

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

Data problems


	The cost of questionnaire-based market research (survey) is increasing exponentially and offers mediocre results without an enormous question bank and harmonization with other surveys.(See 🖱 blogpost)
	Manual data acquisition is an error-prone and boring task for humans that requires many working hours (often not credited in consultancies, law firms, or research institutes.)
	Wrangling spreadsheet tables or word processor documents by people without data knowledge is the 🖱 data Sisyphus.

Data observatories 3.0

Reprex is offering shared data ecosystems. Our observatories are great solutions for organizations without a data specialization:


🌳 Organizations that cannot afford to build a large enough data team to sustain consistent, extensive data collection and processing (many large institutions and companies)
🪴 Who cannot hire even a single data engineer or a data scientist (medium-sized companies, NGOs)
🌱 Who do not even have a permanent IT function (about 2 million European small enterprises and civil society organizations)


	The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.
	We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)
	Our observatories are competitive, because they use high-quality open source scientific software; they exploit the new Data Governance Act and Open Data Directive, deploy web 3.0 data synchronization, and offer great value-added research products.

Platform products	Value added data applications
The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.	The different observatories offer different types of knowledge products, such as statistical yearbooks, various apps, and database access.
Most of them use web 1.0 technologies, inefficient knowledge accumulation. Already 20 of them have been discontinued.	We are developing software solutions that exploit our platforms: we harmonize surveys, statistical data, automate research reporting, elements of market monitoring or ESG reporting.
We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)	Each observatory gives us intimidate customer access to 3-4 large universities, 1-2 large consultancies, and various specialist institutions.

Team


	The two co-founders, 🖱 Daniel Antal, CFA and 🖱 Andrés García Molina, PhD, and the core team manage the ecosystems’ development, develop knowledge management, and direct the software development. 🖱 Team on full screen
	Each observatory has a broader team of users, data and knowledge curators, and developers. The most developed 🖱️ Digital Music Observatory has 16 institutional users and a team of about 20 music and data professionals. The newer observatories have a smaller, initial service development and data curatorial team.

Dutch AI Coalition


💻 Reprex is a member of the Dutch AI Coalition 🖱 click and we help building algorithms that work for all, small and large music organizations, non-profits and commercial ones.
♎ Reprex believes that unequal access to data, data know-how and tools creates inequalities in the benefits in AI.
🚀 Our Listen Local Apps 🖱 click want to make sure that local ecosystems are not colonized by global platforms.

Questions?

🖱 Click the blue links | email | keybase

Reprex: Daniel Antal | Gabija Liaugminaitė | Reprex—big data that works for all

Edibles: Maximilian Schupp | Ruymand Soltani | Edibles.eco—Edible & Biodegradable Tableware

Reprex

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 15:42:00 +0100

MTPA MeetUP

Antal Dániel, CFA - Reprex

2022. december 12.

reprex.nl/slides/reprex-mtpa-2022/

Navigáció

Teljes képernő: F
Következő: ️> Space |Előző :️<
Start: Home | Vége: End
Áttekintés: Esc| előadói jegyzetek: S
Zoom: Alt + Click 🖱️

Data observatory 3.0

A Reprex közös adat ökoszisztémákat kínál olyanok szervezeteknek, akik nem képesek adat specialistákat foglalkoztatni állandóan:


🌳 Olyan szervezetek, amelyek nem rendelkeznek adat szakértőkkel, és nem képesek hosszú távon adatgyűtjési programokat és adatfeldolgozást végezni.
🪴 Nem képesek adat mérnököket és adattudósokat, statisztikusat foglalkoztatni állandóan. (KKV, NGOk)
🌱 Nincsen állandó IT funkció a cégben (kb 20 million európai kisvállalkozás és civil szervezet)


	Az Európai Unió, a Világbank, az OECD és az ENSz több mint 80 úgynevezett ‘data observatory’ platformot, hogy segítse az érdekelt vállalatokat, kutatókat, NGO-kat, kormányzati szereplőket abban, hogy szisztematikusan gyűjtsenek adatokat és rendszerezzenek, osszanak meg tudást.
	Jelenleg a European Music Observatory prototípusán dolgozunk az Európai Bizottság támogatásával (cc 3-4 million euros.) Később hasonló obszervatóriumokat tervezünk más kreatív szektorokban is.
	Az obszervatóriumaink azért kompetitívek, mert magas minőségű, open source tudományos szoftverekre épülnkek, és kihasználják a Data Governance Act és az Open Data Directive előnyeit, valamint a web 3.0 technikai lehetőségeit.

Hogyan célszerű rendezvényekről gondolkodni?


🌱 Eviota 🖱 click Olyan adatbázisokat építenek-e, amelyek kihasználják az Open Data Directive és a Digital Data Governance (data altruism) előnyeit, és integrálják az adófizetők pénzén már összegyűjtött, vagy a felhasználók által adományozott adatokat?
🧾 Az adatbázisok manuális munka nélkül, számítógépek automatiálzt kommunikációjával szinkronizálhatók-e más adatbázisokkal (Linked Open Data, RDF, web 3.0 vagy szemantikus web)?.
🧾 A strukturáltan gyűjtött adatok (kérdőívek a közönség körében, vagy más szisztematikusan gyűjtött kérdőívek) fogalmi és kérdőív-struktúra szintjén harmonizáltak-e más azonos adatokkal (pl. A közönség kérdőív az országban elérhető más kérdőívekkel? A rendezvény adatai megfelelnek-e a schema.org vagy más szabványosító szervezet rendezvény adatainak?)


🎶 Surveyharmonies 🖱 click is our first experimental product that allows you to recycle surveys from all over Europe.
☑️ You ask questions about gender inequalities in many languages (try it EN IT and you get responses from your audience and more than 30,000 other people in various occupational groups all over Europe.
☿️ Join our pan-European gender inequality survey in January 2023.


♯ Listen Local is a 🖱 click trustworthy, ethical AI-powered system that aims to help great artists in small organizations and small countries using big data.
🎶 Our Listen Local Apps want to make sure that local ecosystems are not colonized by global platforms.

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

Data problems


	The cost of questionnaire-based market research (survey) is increasing exponentially and offers mediocre results without an enormous question bank and harmonization with other surveys.(See 🖱 blogpost)
	Manual data acquisition is an error-prone and boring task for humans that requires many working hours (often not credited in consultancies, law firms, or research institutes.)
	Wrangling spreadsheet tables or word processor documents by people without data knowledge is the 🖱 data Sisyphus.

Platform products	Value added data applications
The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.	The different observatories offer different types of knowledge products, such as statistical yearbooks, various apps, and database access.
Most of them use web 1.0 technologies, inefficient knowledge accumulation. Already 20 of them have been discontinued.	We are developing software solutions that exploit our platforms: we harmonize surveys, statistical data, automate research reporting, elements of market monitoring or ESG reporting.
We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)	Each observatory gives us intimidate customer access to 3-4 large universities, 1-2 large consultancies, and various specialist institutions.

Dutch AI Coalition


💻 Reprex is a member of the Dutch AI Coalition 🖱 click and we help building algorithms that work for all, small and large music organizations, non-profits and commercial ones.
♎ Reprex believes that unequal access to data, data know-how and tools creates inequalities in the benefits in AI.
🚀 Our Listen Local Apps 🖱 click want to make sure that local ecosystems are not colonized by global platforms.

Questions?

🖱 Click the blue links | email | keybase

Reprex: Daniel Antal | Gabija Liaugminaitė | Reprex—big data that works for all

Listen Local Nederland, Utrecht, NL

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0000

We will carry out the research outlined in our feasibility study within the [OpenMuse] project from 1 January 2023 in an open collaboration with cultural policymakers, the local music ecosystem, and open source developers. Our partner, MXF tries to put the findings into actionable data services in Lithuania and Ukraine with the help of MusicAire. We develop open tools that can be applied in Utrecht, the Hague, Budapest, Tallinn, Vilnius, Bratislava, or anywhere.

This is a past event. Check out our forthcoming events or write to Daniel Antal or to antaldaniel. Or send an email.

Our ongoing project since 2014 is Listen Local. We would like to find out how can a local music ecosystem, or a small scene avoid being colonized by global players on streaming platforms, radio, or in-store music. How can we make sure that music recommendations connect bands in Utrecht with fans in Utrecht? If a Polish band is visiting Utrecht, music lovers will find their show?

We are arriving at opening to Klein Berlijn at 17.00 where you can sit down with a coffee or a beer to chat. No reservation needed. At 19.30 we are getting on our OV fiets and cycle over to the Vechtclub where we will meet people of the local indie scene, Tiny Rooms, and see two independent bands on stage.

As the sales and promotion of recorded music get fully automated, and even the curation of music for live events gets more and more influenced by machine learning outcomes or social media metrics, how can a DIY label remain relevant? How you can run a small club or a label without having to invest in a multi-million euro data engineering team? Make sure that the algorithm will learn successfully your music offering.

‘I feel at home where people care’ Read Gabija’s interview and check out the band with us.

Reprex’s motto is big data for all. We want to fight data inequalities, data monopolies, and make big data and AI work for self-released artists or small labels, too.

Gabija and Daniel are visiting Utrecht to meet DIY musicians, labels, researchers, fans and friends to find new partners for our Listen Local projects. On an intellectual level, we are interested in trustworthy AI, data feminism, and providing a proper digital representation to music and live performances for all. On a more emotional level, we want to meet musicians and music lovers from the indie scene.

We want to help independent artists to find their next audience, and fans to find their next favorite record or a truly fulfilling live music experience. Gabija had a conversation with The Kurws in our Listen Local Interviews series. She asked the band about where they are coming from, where they want to go? Where they are local? And what they have to offer to the people who will join us on 31 October 2022 in Utrecht?

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Make interviews, get interviewed, write blog posts, or syndicate our content to and from Data & Lyrics.
Don’t forget to vote for Reprex in the Hague Innovators Award competition 2022. The audience voting starts on 1 November 2022.
Download our submission for the competition.
Get in touch!

Daniel Antal (Reprex) EHV Innovation Café Breakout

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Slide Controls

Next: > or Space | Previous: <

Start: Home | Finish: End

Overview: Esc | Fullscreen: F

Zoom: Alt + Click

20,000,000 SMEs and countless NGOs without data engineers

Further information

Read more: Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local
Longer feasibility study: Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad
Scientific version: Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market

Questions?

Get in Touch: Gabija Liaugminaitė | Daniel Antal

Listen Local Slovakia - Hudobné centrum

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Listen Local Slovakia

An invitation for an open
collaboration within
the OpenMuse project.

Daniel Antal
Gabija Liaugminaitė
2022.10.28.

Download in English — — Download in Slovak

Try Forgotify—it is sometimes failing to load!
Read our Data & Lyrics blogpost

Teach the algorithms about the musicologoical, lyrical content of the music
Give biographical and geographical context to the music

Further information

Read more: Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local
Longer feasibility study: Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad
Scientific version: Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market

Questions?

Get in Touch: Gabija Liaugminaitė | Daniel Antal

Listen Local Nederland Meetup in Utrecht

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 16:17:00 +0200

‘I feel at home where people care’ Read Gabija’s interview and check out the band with us.

Reprex’s motto is big data for all. We want to fight data inequalities, data monopolies, and make big data and AI work for self-released artists or small labels, too.

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Make interviews, get interviewed, write blog posts, or syndicate our content to and from Data & Lyrics.
Don’t forget to vote for Reprex in the Hague Innovators Award competition 2022. The audience voting starts on 1 November 2022.
Download our submission for the competition.
Get in touch!

Learn R with Reprex

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 12:35:00 +0200

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

Fullscreen: F

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click 🖱️

Big data that works for all

No matter how big is the problem or how small is your team, `Reprex` fill your reports, dashboards, newsletters, books with data and its visualization.
Learn R with us: you can reduce the inequalities by joining the open source movement, learning to run open source software, ask for help, improve the tutorials, the documentation, and eventually learn to make the computer work for you.
Contributor Covenant: Participating in open source is often a highly collaborative experience. We’re encouraged to create in public view, and we’re incentivized to welcome contributions of all kinds from people around the world. This makes the practice of open source as much social as it is technical.

Get Inspired

Find more interesting and better data: you don’t have to be a data scientist or write code to contribute to our projects.
Data feminism: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Highly inspirational, free, open-source book.
RLadies is a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community.

Contributor Covenant

We as members, contributors, and leaders pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.

Run code from tutorials

retroharmonize.dataobservatory.eu
🖱 Get started
[🖱️ Articles](https://retroharmonize.dataobservatory.eu/articles/index.htm

Find help, ask for help: reprex

Documentation for better tutorials

Debugging and testing code

Contribute to documentation

R is a functional language

R is both a statistical environment and a programming language
R, the open source and further developed version of the S language, is mainly functional
If you did a task at least twice, the 3rd time you better write a function script to keep doing it forever.
Most of your effort will be to find a well-written function for your work
If you cannot find a function, you will modify somebody else’s function, or eventually write your own

R + YAML + markdown = web ready

Learn YAML in Y minutes: tell the computer what you want to do with a document
R Markdown basics: it is just a plain markdown that allows you to insert little R program ‘chunks’.
Awesome markdown editors and pre-writers: find a convenient tool
Google Docs to markdown: practice by translating your Google Docs text to markdown. It is very easy.

Package and release: a team effort

Our open source development projects

🔢 dataset: Synchronize datasets with global knowledge hubs #️⃣ statcodelists: Make your data codes understood globally ♻️ iotables: Create economic or environmental impact assessments in any EU country 🌍 regions: Create from raw survey data more granular statistics in any EU country ✅ retroharmonize: Harmonize questions banks, recycle answers from past surveys ⏭️ all in on one page

Create with us

Questions?

Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Reprex | Home

Learn R with Reprex

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 12:35:00 +0200

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

Fullscreen: F

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click 🖱️

Big data that works for all

No matter how big is the problem or how small is your team, `Reprex` fill your reports, dashboards, newsletters, books with data and its visualization.
Learn R with us: you can reduce the inequalities by joining the open source movement, learning to run open source software, ask for help, improve the tutorials, the documentation, and eventually learn to make the computer work for you.
Contributor Covenant: Participating in open source is often a highly collaborative experience. We’re encouraged to create in public view, and we’re incentivized to welcome contributions of all kinds from people around the world. This makes the practice of open source as much social as it is technical.

Data Feminism

Get Inspired

Find more interesting and better data: you don’t have to be a data scientist or write code to contribute to our projects.
Data feminism: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Highly inspirational, free, open-source book.
RLadies is a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community.

Contributor Covenant

We as members, contributors, and leaders pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.

Run code from tutorials

retroharmonize.dataobservatory.eu
🖱 Get started
🖱️ Articles

Find help, ask for help: reprex

Documentation for better tutorials

Debugging and testing code

Contribute to documentation

R is a functional language

R is both a statistical environment and a programming language
R, the open source and further developed version of the S language, is mainly functional
If you did a task at least twice, the 3rd time you better write a function script to keep doing it forever.
Most of your effort will be to find a well-written function for your work
If you cannot find a function, you will modify somebody else’s function, or eventually write your own

R + YAML + markdown = web ready

Learn YAML in Y minutes: tell the computer what you want to do with a document
R Markdown basics: it is just a plain markdown that allows you to insert little R program ‘chunks’.
Awesome markdown editors and pre-writers: find a convenient tool
Google Docs to markdown: practice by translating your Google Docs text to markdown. It is very easy.

Package and release: a team effort

Our open source development projects

Create with us

Questions?

Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Reprex | Home

Music and Creative Industry Indicators from Needs Assessment to Automated Production

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:42:00 +0200

Invitation for an open collaboration

Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local Slovakia

Controls

Next: Right Arrow | Space | Previous: Left Arrow
Start: Home| Finish: End | Overview: Esc
Speaker notes: S | Fullscreen: F | Zoom: Alt + Click

OpenMuse

Presentation outline

Part I: Daniel Antal, CFA introduces the OpenMuse project [general aims, methodology, work packages], and our offering to Slovak CCSI stakeholders.
Part II: Mária Kmety Barteková, PhD our offering for indicator design and creation, methodology, timeline, quality control.
Part III: Questions and identification of partners and data sources.

Part I: Slovakia as the best practice

Download in English | | Download in Slovak

Part I: OpenMuse offering

Topics

WP1 Slovak creators, including music creators, should earn as much as the European average. Their income should level up to German and Finnish levels.
WP2 Slovak people should find good Slovak music in Lithuania on Spotify, YouTube and the radio. Foreign labels must not increase their market share and colonize the local creative ecosystem.
WP3 Correctly attributing the environmental and social benefits (and costs) of music.
WP4 Making sure that big data and AI works for all. Tap into open data, linked open data, bring the creative sectors to the web 3.0.

Offering Tools

Smart policy documents
Dashboards
Open source software

Bridging the data gap

Data gaps are illusorty

Open Data Directive
Survey recycling

Harmonized data collecton

Survey recycling

Sampling big data

Open Data Directive

Offering methodology

Open Policy Analysis, “Live Policy Documents”
Slovak music market share
Indicator design and high-quality, reproducible indicator creation

Valuations

AI & Data Policies

Trustworthy AI, trustworthy data in culture

Is the algorithm cheating? ➡️ trustworthy AI policy, enabling courts, competition and consumer protection agencies to protect the Slovak CCIs
Is the algorithm learning from bad data? ➡️ national heritage policy, consolidate Slovak CCI data as linked, open data, and sync it daily with the world.
Can we ask for 20% Slovak music in radio, television, YouTube or Spotify?

Topics:
 - European AI regulation and ethics, music AI,
 - non-discriminiation and fair remuneration for
 Slovakia's creators.
 - Smart and future proof local content and media
 regulation, music export, cultural heritage.

Features:
 - The policy brief itself expressed as a resource,
 not a static file that is once finished and downloaded.
 - It is an educational document in itself, it is
 self-refreshing with data, legal and policy texts
 - We educate policy-makers and music professionals
 to talk, write and think about AI in a smart way.

Part II: Indicators

Open Policy Analysis

Role of Cultural Policy Makers

Define the needs within the cultural policymaking in Slovakia
Share already collected data about the cultural entities (from music industry)
Assess the proposed music industry indicators

Indicators: example

Type and extent of side jobs among Slovak musicians
Average number of copyright protected works and neighboring rights protected recordings per musician

Indicators: side job

Define a side job. Develop a strategy to ask or measure it correctly.
Characterize the side job (which other [creative] industry has the performance)
Divide it with the correct number of musicians.

Indicators: copyrights

Define a musician. What type of intellectual property a musician has?
Develop a strategy to ask/measure the number of works/recordings per musician.
Develop a strategy to count/measure number of musicians.
Divide works/recordings with the number of musicians

Who shall we ask?

We would like to involve all relevant policy stakeholders: ministry, parliament, NGOs, government organizations
The Open Policy Analysis allows the involvement of citizens, individual experts, small organizations.

Invitation for an open collaboration

Click for Contacts: Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local Lithuania | LaLa for Artists | Lala for Fans | Open Policy Analysis

Potential Extra Slides

Trustworthy AI

Reprex Open Collaboration NLAIC 2022

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:00:00 +0200

Reprex is looking for new collaborations within the NLAIC

Questions?

Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Reprex

Listen Local Lithuania - Music Information Center

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Slide Controls

Next: > or Space | Previous: <

Start: Home | Finish: End

Overview: Esc | Fullscreen: F

Zoom: Alt + Click

Further information

Read more: Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local
Longer feasibility study: Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad
Scientific version: Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market

Questions?

Get in Touch: Gabija Liaugminaitė | Daniel Antal

Hague Innovators Award 2022

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Data Observatory 3.0

Controls

Next: Right Arrow or Space
Previous: Left Arrow
Start: Home
Finish: End
Overview: Esc
Speaker notes: S
Fullscreen: F
Zoom: Alt + Click
PDF Export: E

Shared evidence ecosystems: data observatories

Organizations that cannot afford to build a large enough data team to sustain consistent, extensive data collection and processing (many large institutions and companies)
Who cannot hire even a single data engineer or a data scientist
Who do not even have a permanent IT function (about 2 million European small enterprises and civil organizations)

What are data observatories?

There are more than 60 functional, and about 20 already discontinued data observatories, i.e. long-term, usually triangular (business, academic, policy) data collection institutions recognized by the EU, OECD or UNESCO, including the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights of the EU or the European Audiovisual Observatory of the Council of Europe.

Do it Smarter

They usually do not exchange standard data with statistical agencies, they are not synchronized on knowledge graphs of the Europeana or national libraries, and their research output is usually not to be found on open science repositories.
The Hague is the winner of the World Smart City Award 2021, and we would like to attract the planned European Music Observatory and other, EU/UNESCO recognized institutions into the town building on the innovations of Reprex and the ecosystem of the Hague.

Strategic objectives

Develop our data observatories as Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Place our Digital Music Observtory, Cultural and Creative Data Observatory, and Green Deal Data Observaotry on knowledge graphs of Europeana, Wikidata, and other open knowledge sytems
Harmonize research artefacts with open repositories such as Zenodo and Figshare.
Achieve EU/UNESCO/OECD recognition for our self-governing, triangular, science-policy-busines triangular data ecosystems as data observatories

Digital Music Observatory

Listen Local in Horizon Europe OpenMuse WP Diversity, Creative Europe MusicAIRE: connected and curated data on 10,000s of music works
Our aim is to describe the entire, currently legally available music repertoire of Slovakia and Lithuania at first, and a large part of Ukraine.
Connected with name authorities, web services.

Possible Collaboration

Connect national collective management organization, national library, and various services (Spotify, YouTube) to make the national repertoire more visible
Create use statistics for cultural diversity policies and monitoring local content regulations
Provide best practice example and open source tools for replication

Creative and Cultural Sectors Industries Data Observatory

Possible Collaboration

The CCSI Data Observatory already has some data assets on Zenodo, and we can upgrade its API (both as Rest API with datacube and with a simple RDF serialization)
Create use statistics for cultural heritage objects and other cultural heritage policy data
Revisit some modest deliverables of RECREO and seek new funding.

Green Deal Data Observatory

Possible Collaboration

The Green Deal Data Observatory is currently developed to provide free or very accessible environmental, social and governance reporting tools to the cultural sector.
It could also be used to provide ecological context to cultural heritage objects (CHO) for greater awareness.

Technical Features

Reprex | Documentation

FAIR

FAIR metadata: Dublin Core & DataCite referential metadata
Integration to FigShare and Zenodo for automated releases and publications

Web 3.0

supported with optional, open source APIs to retrieve the data
supported with RDF serialization

Dissemination Support

support automated publishing and releasing of data, visualizations, newsletters, and long-form documentation in auto-refreshing websites, blogposts, or articles, or even books.
develop an ecosystem of open source software that helps the professional collection, processing, documentation of data conforming the Data Governance Act, and supporting data sharing and data altruism.

Research Automation

Research automation

support research automation

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory

Slides

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

Fullscreen: F

Next: > or Space | Previous: <
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click

Data problems


	The cost of questionnaire-based market research (survey) is increasing exponentially and offers mediocre results without an enormous question bank and harmonization with other surveys.(See 🖱 blogpost)
	Manual data acquisition is an error-prone and boring task for humans that requires many working hours (often not credited in consultancies, law firms, or research institutes.)
	Wrangling spreadsheet tables or word processor documents by people without data knowledge is the 🖱 data Sisyphus.

Data observatories 3.0

Reprex is offering shared data ecosystems. Our observatories are great solutions for organizations without a data specialization:


🌳 Organizations that cannot afford to build a large enough data team to sustain consistent, extensive data collection and processing (many large institutions and companies)
🪴 Who cannot hire even a single data engineer or a data scientist (medium-sized companies, NGOs)
🌱 Who do not even have a permanent IT function (about 2 million European small enterprises and civil society organizations)


	The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.
	We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)
	Our observatories are competitive, because they use high-quality open source scientific software; they exploit the new Data Governance Act and Open Data Directive, deploy web 3.0 data synchronization, and offer great value-added research products.

Platform products	Value added data applications
The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.	The different observatories offer different types of knowledge products, such as statistical yearbooks, various apps, and database access.
Most of them use web 1.0 technologies, inefficient knowledge accumulation. Already 20 of them have been discontinued.	We are developing software solutions that exploit our platforms: we harmonize surveys, statistical data, automate research reporting, elements of market monitoring or ESG reporting.
We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)	Each observatory gives us intimidate customer access to 3-4 large universities, 1-2 large consultancies, and various specialist institutions.

Marketing strategy


	Buma/Stemra like copyright management agencies, music export offices, festivals and venues, University of Amsterdam, Sant’Anna, Economic University of Bratislava, ministries of culture, grant agencies.
	University of Amsterdam, Europeana, Sant’Anna, Hungarian Film Fund
	Connected financial and sustainability reporting: bank consultancies, big four audit companies, large environmental NGOs.
	Antitrust agencies, law firms, economics consultancies working with mergers and other competition related issues.

Target market size


The observatory platforms usually have a build-up cost of about 3-5 million euros and an annual running costs of 0.1-3 million euros.	Some of our basic products are included in the platform service.
Our existing observatories give us access to the market and public surveying markets (cc 30-40 billion euros in the developed nations), particularly to its software component (about 10 billion euros).
retroharmonize integrates pre-existing questionnaire-based surveys and new surveys. It is aimed at large, international survey companies (Kantar, Gfk) and large international survey programs (Eurostat, GESIS).
regions improves the granularity of existing market research with ‘small area statistics’.

Our existing observatories gave us access to environmental impact assessment and currently we build an ESG reporting tool with a central bank, a value bank, and a big four company.
We hope to gain at least 10% global market share on the observatory platform management market to pay our basic data science team and R&D.

Team


	The two co-founders, 🖱 Daniel Antal, CFA and 🖱 Andrés García Molina, PhD, and the core team manage the ecosystems’ development, develop knowledge management, and direct the software development. 🖱 Team on full screen
	Each observatory has a broader team of users, data and knowledge curators, and developers. The most developed 🖱️ Digital Music Observatory has 16 institutional users and a team of about 20 music and data professionals. The newer observatories have a smaller, initial service development and data curatorial team.

Traction

We have a good, organic growth, but we mainly work with very large private and public entities with complicated, lengthy and not startup-friendly procurement with a cash-conversion cycle of up

Funding

We have a good track record in EU tenders, but we would like to build up this reputation in the Netherlands, too, mainly for new platforms.
We help our non-profit users, such as cultural heritage organizations, music export offices, collective rights management agencies to get funding to use our platforms and services. We have a track record in the EU, Slovakia, Lithuania, but not in the Netherlands.
Our for profit-users need a more polished, user-friendlier front-end. Some are interested in joint ventures (like exploiting our survey capabilities). Venture capital would be preferred, as demand outstrips growth.

«««< HEAD

Do it Smarter

They usually do not exchange standard data with statistical agencies, they are not synchronized on knowledge graphs of the Europeana or national libraries, and their research output is usually not to be found on open science repositories.
The Hague is the winner of the World Smart City Award 2021, and we would like to attract the planned European Music Observatory and other, EU/UNESCO recognized institutions into the town building on the innovations of Reprex and the ecosystem of the Hague.

Questions?

Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Reprex

Trustworthy Autonomous Recommender Systems on Music Streaming Platforms

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 19:00:00 +0100

Currently almost 60% of the global recording industry sales are made via streaming platforms. Given the enormity of choice on these platforms, and that music listening is a low-key, routine consumption choice, consumers are more and more relying on the recommendations of autonomous recommendation systems. Streaming platforms are two-sided markets, where recommendations are deployed to enhance the user experience on the consumer side, but they also decide the fate of the investments that composers, lyricists, producers, and performers made into the music. We are going to contribute to a research on how such systems may lead to potentially tilted competition field between the content providers, and more specifically, between major labels and independents.

Reprex maintains the Digital Music Observatory and the Listen Local system for granular microdata about music use in small territories (i.e., on small country or sub-national level.) We will provide data/expertise in music streaming and recommendation systems and links to many relevant stakeholders with our considerable experience running experiments on music platforms.

A research team of the University of East Anglia (UEA) the University of Liverpool (UoL), The University of London (City), and King’s College (KCL), supported by the Competition Market Authority of the United Kingdom and Reprex won a prestigious research grant to understand how recommender systems on music streaming platforms can employ trustworthy AI.

The researchers will explore the relationship between the autonomous recommendation systems and entry barriers via simulation. Working closely with Reprex, they will simulate sets of users, and iteratively generate recommendation lists, which the simulated users will react to by deciding how long to engage for and which recommendations to listen to. Through their engagement their user profiles will be updated based on what they listen to which will feed into future recommendations.

See our Feasibility Study for Listen Local.

The empirical experiments of the project want to explore how autonomous recommendation systems are driving consumer choice in a real-life setting, and to establish causality between the recommendation systems and the barrier to entry. As part of the second work package, the researchers will conduct randomised trials by inviting participants to stream music through our own user interface. Reprex has extensive experience conducting similar experiments in the music domain (for various online, field experiments, and high-quality surveys.)

Link: Eight new TAS research projects announced

Reproducible Economic Impact Assessment

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0100

Get started with iotables.

We made an important, peer-reviewed release of iotables in the last week as a preparation to increase the functionality of our open-source software. The official release of the iotables R package currently works with economic impact assessments, and can evaluate the likely employment, tax, wage, or gross value added direct, indirect and multiplied impacts of various policy changes in about 30 countries.

Originally the package was developed to calculate the economic impact of the Hungarian film tax shelter and the impact of the music sector on the Slovak economy. (See Slovak Music Industry Report).

The new CRAN release improved the documentation of the function and removed most outdated dependencies. The new, development version (which did not go through peer-review yet) is adding new functionality for environmental impact analysis with the following pollutants: Carbon dioxide without emissions from biomass (CO2), Carbon dioxide from biomass (Biomass CO2), Nitroux oxide (N2O), Methane (CH4), Perfluorocarbons (PFCs), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) including nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), Nitrogen oxides (NOx), Non-methane volatile organic compounds, (NMVOC), Carbon monoxide (CO), Particulate matter < 10μm (PM10), Particulate matter < 2,5μm (PM2,5), Sulphur dioxide (SO2), Ammonia (NH3) and their combinations (see Reference Metadata in Euro SDMX Metadata Structure (ESMS)).

Our aim is to develop new sustainable finance applications, and understand the sustainability impacts of bank’s lending activities and insurer’s underwriting activities on climate change mitigation and adoption, biodiversity, preservation of water reservers, preventing pollution, and promoting the circular economy.

EU Taxonomy on Sustainable Activities

The European Commission created an created an EU Taxonomy Compass, which provides a visual representation of the contents of the EU Taxonomy, starting with the Delegated Act on the climate objectives, as adopted on 4 June 2021. Whilst you can download the EU Taxonomy in xlsx or json format, they are not tidy datasets, and they are not particularly well-suited for calculations, filtering, or inclusion in applications.

Reprex created a tidy version of the EU Taxonomy for developing better sustainability indicators into the Green Deal Data Observatory.

Open Data

EU Taxonomy on Sustainable Activities (Tidy) download.

Using our iotables is not for the faint heart. It is a scientific software, and it requires a good command of national accounts, input-output economics and sustainability to work with. Our Green Deal Data Observaotry is designed to be an API of scientific software, and produce clean, ready to use data for researchers, policy-makers and business planners who do not have the skills to work with scientific software. We are planning to release well-designed datasets that go through dozens of checks to make sure they have the best data quality.

Do you want to develop input-output models for any European country to measure the direct and indirect green house gas impacts of policy actions? Do you need well-formatted data on interindustry linkages or other relevant topics for sustainable economy or susitainable finance research? Get in touch with us – we are happy to help and test our new software tool with data you need, and create high-quality, open datasets that are ready to use.

Jumping Ahead With the Digital Music Observatory

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0100

Our Digital Music Observatory project spent a year in the JUMP Music Market Accelerator’s program. Over the course of 9 months, co-founder Daniel Antal could meet many stakeholders from almost all European countries, meet other new music technology startups and projects, and got mentoring and other professional help to further develop the project.

The Digital Music Observatory is one of the several initiatives to fill the data gaps of the fragmented European music ecosystems. While most of Europe’s music is available and promoted on data-heavy, AI-driven autonomous platforms like TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, music labels, publishers, national export offices are lacking the necessary data solutions to remain competitive.

Daniel is pitching for partnership with Music Tech Europe on Linechech and finding a music city that wants to be the seat of the future European Music Observatory. Photo: Wen Liu.

One of the recurring themes of 2021 was the notion that the music streaming economy is broken. Several JUMP fellows are working on various projects that aim to fix this, and our Digital Music Observatory has both the data and track record to provide evidence and test ideas about possible solutions – change in pricing, better targeting in export and domestic markets, and checking for algorithmic biases. See what we have done in the field this year in the UK IPO-initiated Music Creators’ Earning project; understanding algorithmic recommendation problems with the support of the Slovak Arts Council, and making recommendations about better music metadata and copyright regulation with our research consortium.

The other very interesting theme of the year was the emergence of new, immersive music tech companies. We hope that our Digital Music Observatory can grow into a hub for their data needs, too. How is the world of 2.7 billion gamer and music lovers is forming a new market for Ristband? We would also like to curate data about the healing effects of sound, and work in the future with immersive, functional music providers like Flower of Sound who place music and sound design into a less stressful, more healthy acoustic environment.

We were often criticized for placing too little emphasis on data visualization. Our next priority is to provide clear, beautiful infographs and charts to all of our datasets.

There were many professionals who helped us in the JUMP program. We are particularly thankful for Alessanra di Caro (partnership building), Elodie Crouzet (program coordination), Steve Farris (mentoring), Veronique Friedrich (team building), Thierry Giesler (improving our pitch) and Anna Zò (Music Tech Europe).

Are you a data user? Give us some feedback! Shall we do some further automatic data enhancements with our datasets? Document with different metadata? Link more information for business, policy, or academic use? Please ive us any feedback!

Reprex on MaMA

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 19:00:00 +0000

Reprex’s co-founder, the main developer of the Digital Music Observatory, Daniel Antal and Digital Music Observatory curator, Marie Zhorová participated in the MaMA Festival & Convention in Paris on 13-15 October within the JUMP Music Market Accelerator Program Program. We introduced our Digital Music Observatory to national music organizations and encouraged them to try out a cooperation with us. (See Use Cases below)

Our main aim was to find new users to our Digital Music Observatory, and to find partners for a future Horizon Europe R&D project to develop the scientific pillars of the Observatory in a manner that meets practical industry needs and the feature requirements laid out in hte Feasiblity Study for a Euroepan Music Observatory.

Our concept was introduced in Le Trianon to a wider audience during the JUMP Music Market Accelerator Pitch Session and in one-to-one meetings to representatives of French national organizations. We have also started to investigate the possibility to cooperate with two startups to bring our data services closer to artists, labels, and publishers.

Use Cases

Fair Streaming

Daniel introduced our work made for the UK IPO’s Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Era Project about the justified and not-justified differences among music rightsholders earnings and the diminishing market value of streams. We believe that our UK approach is a particularly interesting addition to join with the distribution analysis performed by the Centre Nationale de la Musique and Deloitte in France.

Fair Value

Daniel introduced to collective management professioanls our innovative approach for private copying valuation, royalty price setting, estimating the values of value transfer to media platforms, and other topics of interests for collective management and rights management organizations. Our approach has a proven track record to increase revenues for creators.

Open Music Observatory

We introduced our approach to building the European Music Observatory in a decentralized way, relying not only on the resources of Creative Europe but also on Open Science, Horizon Europe, bringing the music industry, music research in universities and cultural policy under one open collaboration. Because France is building its own music observatory of a kind, the decentralized approach could particularly benefit French stakeholders.

Listen Local

Why Data Observatory?

Our use cases highlight the value of having a wide range of data available for the industry players, researchers and policy-makers. In the era of big data, and when open data is becoming legally more and more available, it is important to have one place with a single data collection method. Copernicus built a permanent observatory for the ongoing observation of celestial bodies. We built an automated data observatory to permanently collect data about music.

Research & Analysis: Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Era

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Reprex with its Digital Music Observatory team was commissioned to prepare an analysis on the justified and not justified differences in music creators’ earnings. We have posted our most important findings in an earlier blogpost (Music Creators’ Earnings in the Streaming Era. United Kingdom Research Cooperation With the Digital Music Observatory.

The UK Intellectual Property Office has published the entire report on the music creators’ earnings, and we have made our detailed analysis available in a side-publication. Reprex also signed an agreement with the researchers of the Music Creators’ Earnings project to deposit all data published in the report in the Digital Music Observatory, and to promote the building of the observatory further.

The research questions asked in this report are related to the Music Creator Earnings’ Project (MCE), exploring issues concerning equitable remuneration and earnings distributions. We were tasked with providing a longitudinal analysis of earnings development and relating our findings to equitable remuneration. The starting point of our work was centred around a very broadly defined problem: how much money music creators (rightsholders) earn from streaming, how these earnings are distributed, and how the earnings and their distribution have developed during the last decade.

The highly globalized music industry generates two important international reports, as well as several national reports, but these are not suitable for the analysis of the typical or average rightsholder, nor for small labels and publishers who do not represent a large and internationally diversified portfolio of music works or recordings. Copyright and neighboring right revenues are collected in national jurisdictions. Because British artists are almost never constrained by their use of language, and the UK Music Industry is highly competitive in the global music markets, even relatively less known rightsholders earn revenues from dozens of national markets. The lack of market information on music sales volumes, prices for each jurisdiction, and the unaccounted for national, domestic, and foreign revenues makes the analysis of the rightholder’s earnings, or the economics of a certain distribution channel like music streaming or media platforms, impossible.

The Effect of International Diversification on Revenues - a combination of international price differences and exchange rate fluctuations.

While total earnings are reported by international and national organizations, they hide five important economic variables: changes in sales volumes, changes in prices, market share on various national jurisdictions (which have their own volume and price movements), the exchange rates applied, and the share of the repertoire exploited. Even worse, the global music industry has no comprehensive database of rightsholders, music works, and recordings – this is the data gap that we would like fill with the Digital Music Observatory.

Our report highlights some important lessons. First, we show that in the era of global music sales platforms it is impossible to understand the economics of music streaming without international data harmonization and advanced surveying and sampling. Paradoxically, without careful adjustments for accruals, market shares in jurisdictions, and disaggregation of price and volume changes, the British industry cannot analyze its own economics because of its high level of integration to the global music economy. Furthermore, the replacement of former public performances, mechanical licensing, and private copying remunerations (which has been available for British rightsholders in their European markets for decades) with less valuable streaming licenses has left many rightsholders poorer. Making adjustments on the distribution system without modifying the definition of equitable remuneration rights or the pro-rata distribution scheme of streaming platforms opens up many conflicts while solving not enough fundamental problems. Therefore, we suggest participation in international data harmonization and policy coordination to help regain the historical value of music.

Context

The idea of our Digital Music Observatory was brought to the UK policy debate on music streaming by the Written evidence submitted by The state51 Music Group to the Economics of music streaming review of the UK Parliaments’ DCMS Committee¹.

The music industry requires a permanent market monitoring facility to win fights in competition tribunals, because it is increasingly disputing revenues with the world’s biggest data owners. This was precisely the role of the former CEEMID² program, which was initiated by a group of collective management societies. Starting with three relatively data-poor countries, where data pooling allowed rightsholders to increase revenues, the CEEMID data collection program was extended in 2019 to 12 countries.The final regional report, after the release of the detailed Hungarian, Slovak and Croatian reports of CEEMID was sponsored by Consolidated Independent (of the state51 music group.)

CEEMID was eventually to formed into the Demo Music Observatory in 2020³, following the planned structure of the European Music Observatory, and validated in the world’s 2nd ranked university-backed incubator, the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Validation Lab. In 2021, under the final name Digital Music Observatory, it became open for any rightsholder or stakeholder organization or music research institute, and it is being launched with the help of the JUMP European Music Market Accelerator Programme which is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

In December 2020, we started investigating how the music observatory concept could be introduced in the UK, and how our data and analytical skills could be used in the Music Creators’ Earnings in the Streaming Era (in short: MCE) project, which is taking place paralell to the heated political debates around the DCMS inquiry. After the state51 music group gave permission for the UK Intellectual Property Office to reuse the data that was originally published as the experimental CEEMID-CI Streaming Volume and Revenue Indexes, we came to a cooperation agreement between the MCE Project and the Digital Music Observatory. We provided a detailed historical analysis and computer simulation for the MCE Project, and we will host all the data of the Music Creators’ Earnings Report in our observatory, hopefully no later than early July 2021.

The Digital Music Observatory contributes to the Music Creators’ Earnings in the Streaming Era project with understanding the level of justified and unjustified differences in rightsholder earnings, and putting them into a broader music economy context.

We started our cooperation with the two principal investigators of the project, Prof David Hesmondhalgh and Dr Hyojugn Sun back in April and will start releasing the findings and the data in July 2021.

Join us

Do you need high-quality data for your music business or institution? Are you a music researcher? Join our open collaboration Digital Music Observatory team as a data curator, developer or business developer.

Footnote References

state51 Music Group. 2020. “Written Evidence Submitted by The state51 Music Group. Economics of Music Streaming Review. Response to Call for Evidence.” UK Parliament website. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/15422/html/. ↩︎
Artisjus, HDS, SOZA, and Candole Partners. 2014. “Measuring and Reporting Regional Economic Value Added, National Income and Employment by the Music Industry in a Creative Industries Perspective. Memorandum of Understanding to Create a Regional Music Database to Support Professional National Reporting, Economic Valuation and a Regional Music Study.” ↩︎
Antal, Daniel. 2021. “Launching Our Demo Music Observatory.” Data & Lyrics. Reprex. https://dataandlyrics.com/post/2020-09-15-music-observatory-launch/. ↩︎

Eurobarometer Surveys Used In Our Project

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In our tutorial series, we are going to harmonize the following questionnaire items from five Eurobarometer harmonized survey files. The Eurobarometer survey files are harmonized across countries, but they are only partially harmonized in time.

All data must be downloaded from the GESIS Data Archive in Cologne. We are not affiliated with GESIS and you must read and accept their terms to use the data.

Eurobarometer 80.2 (2013)

GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA5877 Data file Version 2.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12792

Data file: ZA6595 data file (European Commission 2017).
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 83.4 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA6595 Bibtex

QA1a Which of the following do you consider to be the single most serious problem facing the world as a whole? (single choice)

QA1b Which others do you consider to be serious problems? (multiple choice)

QA2 And how serious a problem do you think climate change is at this moment? Please use a scale from 1 to 10, with '1' meaning it is "not at all a serious problem (scale 1-10)

QA4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Fighting climate change and using energy more efficiently can boost the economy and jobs in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QA4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU could benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QA5 Have you personally taken any action to fight climate change over the past six months? (binary)

Eurobarometer 83.4 (2015)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication COMM.A.1 ´Strategy, Corporate Communication Actions and Eurobarometer´GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA6595 Data file Version 3.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13146

Data file: ZA6595 data file (European Commission 2018).
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 83.4 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA6595 Bibtex

Eurobarometer 87.1 (2017)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication, COMM.A.1 ‘Strategic Communication’; European Parliament, Directorate-General for Communication, Public Opinion Monitoring Unit GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA6861 Data file Version 1.2.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12922

Data file: ZA6861 data file.
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 90.2 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA6861 Bibtex

QC1a Which of the following do you consider to be the single most serious problem facing the world as a whole? (single choice)

QC1b Which others do you consider to be serious problems? (multiple choice)

QC2 And how serious a problem do you think climate change is at this moment? Please use a scale from 1 to 10, with '1' meaning it is "not at all a serious problem (scale 1-10)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Fighting climate change and using energy more efficiently can boost the economy and jobs in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Promoting EU expertise in new clean technologies to countries outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can increase the security of EU energy supplies (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - More public financial support should be given to the transition to clean energies even if it means subsidies to fossil fuels should be reduced. (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc5 Have you personally taken any action to fight climate change over the past six months? (binary)

Eurobarometer 90.2 (2018)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication, COMM.A.3 ‘Media Monitoring and Eurobarometer’ GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7488 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13289

Data file: ZA7488 data file (European Commission 2019a)
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 90.2 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA7488 Bibtex

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Fighting climate change and using energy more efficiently can boost the economy and jobs in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Promoting EU expertise in new clean technologies to countries outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can increase the security of EU energy supplies (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - More public financial support should be given to the transition to clean energies even if it means subsidies to fossil fuels should be reduced. (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Eurobarometer 91.3 (2019)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication, COMM.A.3 ‘Media Monitoring and Eurobarometer’ GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7572 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13372

Data file: ZA7572 data file (European Commission 2019b).
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 91.3 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA7572 Bibtex

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Taking action on climate change will lead to innovation that will make EU companies more competitive (N) (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Promoting EU expertise in new clean technologies to countries outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Adapting to the adverse impacts of climate change can have positive outcomes for citizens in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 Have you personally taken any action to fight climate change over the past six months? (binary)

References

European Commission, Brussels. 2017. “Eurobarometer 80.2 (2013).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA5877 Data file Version 2.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12792. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12792.

———. 2018. “Eurobarometer 83.4 (2015).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA6595 Data file Version 3.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13146. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13146.

———. 2019a. “Eurobarometer 90.2 (2018).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7488 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13289. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13289.

———. 2019b. “Eurobarometer 91.3 (2019).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7572 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13372. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13372.

Product/Market Fit Validation in Yes!Delft

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:31:39 +0000

We would like to validate our product market/fit in two segments, business/policy research and scientific research, with a supporting role given to data journalism. Because we want to follow a bootstrapping strategy, we must focus on those clients where we find the highest value proposition, which is of course easier said than done. We see much interest in our offering from other continents, therefore we truly welcome the opportunity that we can do this on a truly global business canvas in one of the worlds’ top five incubators, the number 2 university-backed incubator in the world, second to none in Europe, in the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Validation Lab.

In Europe hundreds of thousands of microenterprises, such as record labels, video producers or book publishers are facing data and AI giants like Google’s YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix or Amazon. If the recommendation engines of these giants do not recommend their songs, films or books, then their investments are doomed to fail, because about half of the global sales are driven by AI algorithms. When they make a claim for the missing money, they will immediately find themselves in a dispute with gigabytes of data that they can only handle with a data scientist, even though they do not even have an IT professional or an HR professional to make the hire.

An awful lot of money, creativity and real values are at stake, and we want to be on the creator’s side, their technician’s side, their manager’s side when they want to get a fair share from the pie and they want to help these industry leader to make the pie grow.

The UNESCO and the EU have been promoting as an organizational solution the fragmentation problem with the so-called data observatories that are pooling the business, policy, and scientific research needs of various domains, like music. This is an idea that we really like, and we believe that our research automation solutions can help these observatories to grow faster as ecosystems, create better quality and more timely data and research products and a far lower cost.

We define ourselves as a reproducible research company inspired by the philosophy of open collaboration, based on open-source software and open data. We want to explore various revenue models around these ideas.

We are not committed to open source licensing if more permissive licensing policies provide us with better opportunities.
We would like to explore various data-as-service models, because we do not want to be locked into the position of cheap open data vendors.
We want to deploy AI applications that really help earning money in these sectors with playlisting, recommendation engines, forecasting applications, or royalty valuations, because our open collaboration approach brings up enough data sooner to than its alternatives, because it manages inherent conflicts of interests, fragmentation, and decentralization better than hierarchical solutions.

Timeline

In January CEEMID reached its peak: we introduced a 12-country reproducible research project made with only freelancers in Brussels, presented as best use case of evidence-based policy design.
In February Daniel visited the Yes!Delft Co-Lab to find out who would be the best co-founder to re-launch CEEMID as an enterprise.
In April we started to release our data as open data for validation.
One month ago we started-up.
Then we launched the music.dataobservatory.eu project.
A few other data observatories.

Bonus:

Palato in the Hague, where we took our selfie and had an absolutely amazing dinner after the pitch. Check them out!

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Press `F` on your keyboard

Enter full screen mode: on your keyboard

Full screen: F or Overview: Esc
forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

SKCMDb: The Slovak Comprehensive Music Database

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Enter full screen mode: F

forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End
Overview: Esc or zoom with Alt + Click️

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Wikimuseum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Daniel Antal

Spaces of a Constructive Dialogue

Spaces of a Constructive Discourse

One Song, Many Free Uses

When the Heir to the Throne Met the Udmurts

Federating Open Knowledge through Wikibase: The Case of The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Mari Clothing Heritage Across Collections

Open Access Music Dataspaces – Open Music Observatory

Wikibase as a Data Sharing Space: Connecting Rights, Communities, and GLAM through Federated Infrastructures

Key Ideas

Examples

Next Steps

Livestream recording

Brace for Impact: Trustworthy AI for Good

Key Idea

Next Steps

WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space

Highlights

Next steps

Livestream recording

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Who should attend?

Why attend?

Practical details

Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

TextileBase: Introduction

Topics For Discussion

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo UI

TextileBase

Slide Navigation

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Questions?

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo Semantic Browser

Next steps

Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory

Metadata Groundhog Day: What a Moribound Language Can Teach Spotify and Shopify

Mazirbe Is Missing Again

But Mazirbe exists!

A Gazetteer That Works Like Real Life

So What?

Lessons We Took Away

See It / Fork It / Repurpose It

The Concept of a WikiMuseum

Slide Navigation (press F)

Building Blocks

Questions?

TextileBase

Why Textiles?

Who is TextileBase for?

Examples from the Database

Connecting Artefacts Across Borders

Understanding Secondary Sources

Following Shifting Place Names

Building a Wikimuseum for Dispersed Collections

Next Steps

Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

What are the competencies of the system that we are building?

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Navigation

Questions?

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Slide navigation

What we actually do?

Questions?

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Slide navigation

Questions?

Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

ELTE Digital Heritage Meetup

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