Antal Dániel honlapja

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

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.

Udmurt Történeti Fotógyűjtemény

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

The Udmurt Historical Photographs Collection is a growing, open, and linked collection of dispersed historical photographs of Udmurt people and places in Udmurtia. We bring together relevant photographs (or their digital surrogates) and aim to place them under the care of the Udmurt community and researchers of Udmurt cultural history.

Our goal is to identify relevant photographs and provenance information in Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, and other collections, and to validate, enrich, or repair this knowledge with the contribution of Udmurt communities.

For example, the reverse side of one photograph contains a difficult-to-decipher location (“Gombur-Gurt” and “Medemuka”) written in phonetic German transliteration. The image, labeled simply as “Udmurt woman,” belongs to a series in the photographic collection of the Estonian National Museum, where provenance is limited and some elements were removed in the 1950s by Soviet censorship.

Can we identify who this woman was? Where the series was taken? Who the photographer was? And can we locate missing images from the same series in other collections?

Answering these questions requires knowledge of the Udmurt language and historical cartography. Solving such cases can clarify the provenance of individual photographs and help recover dispersed or lost materials. Our collaborative work with Wikimedia Hungary and Udmurt communities demonstrates how this process can be carried out.

Short summary

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 Gergő László founded Lumen, which remains an iconic cultural location in Budapest, and 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.

Főfotó

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fortepan is not only an open, privately run photography archive, but has effectively become a Hungarian national institution. Originally built from rescued negatives found during informal “spring-cleaning” discoveries, it has grown into a subjectively curated yet widely used visual memory of Hungary before 1989. Still operated by a civil society organisation, Fortepan today collaborates with major institutions, contributes to exhibitions and publications, and increasingly serves as a repository for private and institutional photographic collections.

I have been involved with Fortepan as a user, volunteer, and donor for many years. My most significant contribution was the localisation and recovery of the long-lost negative archive of Főfotó, a centralised photographic enterprise created after the nationalisation of private studios in socialist Hungary. This organisation documented architecture, industry, public life, and everyday scenes, but its archive disappeared during the transition of the 1990s.

Through collecting and analysing historical negatives acquired on the art market, I identified traces of this lost archive and, together with Fortepan, initiated a process that led to its partial reconstruction. At this point, no institutional buyer had the resources or the legal capacity to buy this risky find, so I stepped into as a buyer. We transferred 400,000 negatives (for comparison: more than the permanent collection of the Dutch Photography Museum) in a van to Budapest from a tiny, almost derelict village.

The 35mm rolls from the 1980s occupied the least space.

After clarifying legal and provenance issues, which took quiet some time, the 400,000 that came in large banana boxes and their original drawer structure ( the most important physical organisational system that we wanted to preserve intact) this collection lived with me, filling much of my bedroom.

After a long process, the with surviving inventory records—were recovered, digitised in part by Fortepan, and ultimately deposited in the Budapest City Archives. This process required not only historical and technical expertise, but also careful negotiation around ownership, provenance, and public accessibility.

For me, this project represents a concrete example of how photographic heritage can be reconstructed outside institutional frameworks and later reintegrated into them. It reflects a long-standing interest in the lifecycle of collections—how they are created, lost, rediscovered, and reinterpreted—and in the role that individuals and civic initiatives can play in preserving cultural memory.

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

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

Ez a tanulmány a Finnugor Adatmegosztási tér (FUDSS) tervezését és korai megvalósítását mutatja be. Ez az adattér egytöbbnyelvű, közösség által vezérelt prototípus a kulturális örökségi adatok intézményi és földrajzi határokon átívelő összekapcsolására. A FUDSS-t nem egy kész infrastruktúraként, hanem egy tervrajzként és feltáró modellként kell értelmezni – minimális erőforrásokkal, de a zenei metaadatok irányításával kapcsolatos korábbi munkánk alapján, amely mind állami, mind magánszereplők bevonásával készült. Ezt a kísérleti környezetet használjuk fel a meglévő finnugor tudásrendszerek strukturális problémáinak áttekintésére: a Wikipédia lív és mari kezdeményezéseinek negatív eredményei, a diaszpórikus tudás szétszóródása és a nemzeti GLAM infrastruktúrák korlátai. Az empirikus szakirodalomra és saját irányítási gyakorlatunkra építve egy könnyűsúlyú, föderális infrastruktúrát javasolunk, amely a Wikibase-re és a nyílt ontológiákra épül, és lehetővé teszi a többnyelvű szókincsek, a kontextuális annotációk és az etikus adatösszekapcsolás használatát anélkül, hogy ellaposítaná a helyi ismeretelméleteket. A szetu textilgyűjtemények és a Hõimulõimed többnyelvű dalgyűjtemény esettanulmányai szemléltetik, hogyan támogatja a prototípus a kulturális rekonstrukciót és a részvételen alapuló gazdagodást. Bár adatterünk egyelőre nem intézményes megoldás, a DSS bemutatja, hogyan szolgálhat egy szemantikailag gazdag, közösségalapú modell szélesebb körű alkalmazások tesztalapjaként az alacsony léptékű kulturális ökoszisztémákban.

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:

WikiMuseum

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wikimuseum is an experimental curatorial concept developed with Wikimedia Eesti and Wikimedia Hungary, creating multilingual, co-curated exhibitions across Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia. It brings together dispersed cultural heritage—often never seen together physically—into structured digital exhibitions that connect institutional collections, private archives, and community knowledge.

The project explores how open platforms can support collaboration between museums, researchers, and source communities, while addressing legal, ethical, and data governance challenges.

Key exhibitions & outcomes

Livonian Traditional Dress (TextileBase integration) A cross-border exhibition connecting collections from Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, forming the first comprehensive, structured visual and data-driven presentation of the dress heritage of Liv (Livonian) people.

Mari Traditional Clothing (ERM-led multilingual exhibition) Built primarily on ERM collections and complemented by Finnish and Wikimedia Commons materials, this exhibition provides accessible interpretation in Estonian, Hungarian, English, Russian, and Meadow Mari, reconnecting dispersed heritage with both international audiences and Mari communities.

Udmurt Ethnographic Photography (ongoing, community-informed curation) A collaborative project with Wikimedia Hungary and Udmurt contributors focusing on improving provenance, correcting historical descriptions, and identifying dispersed or censored photographic materials across collections.

Key insights / lessons

Open platforms can function as curated museum environments, not only repositories, when structured with clear metadata and narrative layers
Multilingual annotation and community participation enable reconstruction of missing knowledge, especially for underrepresented or historically misrepresented groups
Digital co-curation creates new forms of collaboration between institutions, civic initiatives, and source communities, but requires careful handling of legal, ethical, and governance questions

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)

Green Paper on AI, Data Governance, and Metadata Policies for Europe’s Music Ecosystem (v0.1 Early Release)

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About this Release

This Green Paper is an open consultation draft produced by the Open Music Europe consortium as part of Horizon Europe Deliverable D5.7.
It has been released early in line with the principles of Open Policy Analysis (OPA) to make the drafting process auditable, invite feedback from stakeholders, and ensure transparency.

Important: This version is not for citation in academic or policy work. A stable version with a DOI will be released later in 2025 and will serve as the basis for Deliverable D5.7 (Policy Brief) and a subsequent White Paper.

Participate

We invite stakeholders from music, cultural heritage, and AI governance communities to comment and contribute to this draft.
Please visit the Zenodo record or the Open Music Europe website for more information.

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

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

Cikkünk azt mutatja be, hogyan lehet a tudásgráf által biztosított tudás interoperabilitásával javítani az öltözködéstörténeti és textilipari kutatásokat. A digitális kulturális és történelmi adatok növekvő elérhetősége nem jár együtt a használhatóságuk hasonló mértékű növekedésével. Ezért a keresési sugár kiterjesztése a tudományterületek és országok közötti gyűjteményekre a tudás harmonizációját és interoperabilitását igényli. A Reprex létrehozta a TextileBase-t – egy tudásbázist, amely teljes mértékben interoperábilis a könyvtárakkal, levéltárakkal, múzeumokkal, a Wikidata nyílt tudásrendszerrel és a nyílt tudományos adattárrendszerekkel. A cikk kiemeli a keresések megfogalmazásakor és a terminológiai eltérések kezelésénél figyelembe veendő kulcsfontosságú szempontokat annak biztosítása érdekében, hogy az ország-, nyelvi vagy tudományterületi határokon átnyúlóan dolgozó adatszolgáltatók megértsék a kívánt jelentést. A releváns történelmi ruhadarabokat említő szöveges források könyvtárakban, a kortárs ábrázolásokat tartalmazó archívumokban és az új műtárgyakat tartalmazó múzeumi gyűjteményekben való kereshetőség javítása és egyszerűsítése érdekében a TextileBase az adatokat és metaadatokat tudásmeghatározásokká alakítja, a kifejezéseket egy nemzetközileg ellenőrzött szókincshez kapcsolja, és gondosan összehasonlítja a különböző kutató- és gyűjteményi intézmények munkáit.

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/

Remapping the Livonian Coast: A Multilingual Gazetteer of the Settlements of Northern Kurzeme

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Read our blogpost introducting the data paper: Metadata Groundhog Day: What a Moribound Language Can Teach Spotify and Shopify.

The Concept of a WikiMuseum

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

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

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

Open Music Registers

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About this Release

This technical paper is part of the Open Music Observatory under the Horizon Europe Open Music Europe project.
It presents an early framework for federated music registers and demonstrates how they can support rights management, cultural statistics, and business innovation.

The current edition describes the design principles and pilot implementations.
Future editions will extend the model with more data partners, stress-tested pipelines, and additional use cases.

Note: This is a technical release and should be cited using the DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14767717.

Participate

We invite music industry partners, cultural institutions, and researchers to engage with the pilot registers and help refine the model.
Please visit the Zenodo record or the Open Music Observatory for more information.

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

PRESS 🇫 KEY ON YOUR KEYBOARD

Forward: ️> vagy Space |Back :️<
Begin: Home | End: End
Áttekintés: Esc| Zoom: Alt + Click️
FULL SCREEN: F

🖱 Coloured: clickable links
The best is to view slides in full screen (F) mode.

Click through: data and playlists.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software.

Supplementary notes can be added here, including code and math.

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

SKCMDb

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:16:00 +0100

Early Data Access

Wikibase Interfaces

In machine-readable TTL format: https://reprexbase.eu/skcmdb/Special:EntityData/Q485.ttl In XML or JSON, JSON-LD, N-Triples.

SPARQL Endpoint

http://135.181.91.51:3030/#/dataset/skcmdb/query; requires password.

Sampo Semantic Browser

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

Next steps

Project History

Download our feasibility study from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6427514.

In 2020, we studied the effect of increasingly AI-driven streaming platforms on the Slovak music repertoire. We realised that music is being recommended by algorithms, not only to YouTube or Spotify subscribers but also to radio editors, concert promoters, and festival organisers. We realised that rights management organisations (CMOs), music information centres (MICs), and music libraries, archives, and documentation centres (MLs) must change their practices to remain competitive and visible.

In the Open Music Europe project¹, we are building a data infrastructure that aims to coordinate music knowledge (in our demonstration example, Slovak music) stored in various institutional silos and systems. We wanted to “plug in” the database of the MIC Slovak Music Centre (MCS) into a global data system like Wikipedia or Spotify and, at the same time, connect it with the Slovak CMO SOZA, the Slovak National Library and the music section of the ML Bratislava City Library. A data science company, Reprex, oversees this process.

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.

As seen from the points made above, this data infrastructure is beneficial to a great degree for all the parties involved.

European Interoperability Framework for Music

Nowadays most data is downloaded and used by intelligent software agents on various digital services and platforms. To meet the modern service requirements of 2025, we needed to implement an enhanced implementation of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) that extends to privately held data. We need to communicate information and metadata about Slovak music in a way that musicologists, musicians and their managers, copyright law practitioners, citizen scientists as well as software agents understand worldwide.

The EIF is a four-layered specification for how to create world-class digital public services. In music, however, the private sector is vital, too. CISAC’s members, the CMOs that register new works, are private parties. To add weight, digital streaming platforms ingest more metadata about music in a week than Europeana Sound over ten years.

On the European Interoperability Framework see: (European Commission 2017).

To ensure legal and organisational interoperability, the members of the Open Music Consortium (SOZA–Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society, MCS, Reprex) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Slovak Ministry of Culture; later, MCS, SOZA and Reprex signed a more technical MoU with the Slovak National Library².

The aim at the legal level was to understand the different rules of business and statistical confidentiality, as well as data protection rules in general. Harmonising the GDPR across a public information body like MCS and a private entity like SOZA is particularly challenging.
On the organisational level, we must ensure that different organisations (MCS, SOZA and the national library) understand each other’s data and workflows, for example, in identifying a musical work or a musical group with no legal personality.
On the semantic level, we must ensure that the databases of MCS, SOZA, and the national library understand each other.
The technical level must ensure that harmonised workflows result in successful data exchanges, given the legal constraints and semantic definitions.

In our system design, we followed two important new European initiatives. In connecting cultural data, European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCH), and the Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory. Concerning connecting authoritative data across governmental and private systems, we adhere to the novel European data governance regulations³.

A data (sharing) space is a system that integrates data whenever it is needed, or is permitted, with some labour-intensive aspects of data integration postponed until it is possible to carry them out. In a data sharing space, like Reprex’s Motion Picture Dataspace, we know where the data is in each organisation, we know its format, documentation standards, even known problems and issues. But we only load them into an application, for example, an application that calculates environmental effects or GHG emissions when it is needed and permitted. Our dataspace reduces the work in such scenarios by by setting up automatic matching and mapping generation techniques⁴.

Wikibase is the software that runs the worlds largest open knowledge graph database, Wikidata, which synchronises knowledge with about 330 (different language) Wikipedias and countless national libraries, music services, and other data sources. Our dataspace is powered by an extended and configured Wikibase system. Wikibase has often been used for authority control; it is also the system of the EU Knowledge Graph⁵.

The most notorious problem plaguing digital services and databases is the unresolved issue of named entity disambiguation. With digital services providing access to over 100 million recordings, we often find dozens of artists or works with the same title. Named-entity ambiguity is confusing for humans and for autonomous AI systems, too.

Our system focuses on harmonising the registration processes of various knowledge organisations, such as libraries and CMOs. We want to ensure that every artist, music group and the manifestation of their work in music recordings and sheets receive a globally unique and persistent identifier. We want to provide new recordings and sheets in at least one public library with a globally used VIAF (and, when applicable, an ISNI) identifier. To support named-entity disambiguation going back to hundreds of years of music creations and events diaries, we are developing trustworthy AI systems that remain strictly under human control in line with the new requirements of the EU’s AI Actt⁶.

Disseminating information

Returning to our Feasibility study, we realised that about half of the music streams had data problems. They resulted in late or missed royalty payments. We also realised that almost a fifth of the Slovak repertoire had such low-quality metadata that music recommender systems could not make sense of what their recordings work. We are changing this situation. We want to ensure that we realise if the “Internet knows” misleading information about a work or recording. Using modern data-enriching techniques, we ensure that the MCS and SOZA have the most accurate 360° views of the repertoire they represent. By data dissemination, we also guarantee that digital streaming services and search engines are informed about precise and up-to-date knowledge.

We carry out health checks on the metadata of artists and labels and highlight missing, potentially misleading, or erroneous information.
Utilising Wikidata and Wikipedia, we disseminate the correct information to streaming services and search engines (which rely on knowledge graph technologies and regularly crawl Wikidata.) We are hosting a Wikipedian in Residence to find better cooperation with the Wikipedian community and the curator community of Wikidata.
We are building the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb) that will inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content (legally stipulated) broadcasting quota, where orchestras can find for purchase or public lending scores of works or where professional and enthusiast audiences find any music ever made in Slovakia.
We are designing a new digital distribution model for non-profits and self-releasing artists who need help receiving professional service due to the low commercial value of their culturally valuable works.
We are also experimenting with data bias checks to find out about potential algorithmic biases that work against the Slovak repertoire.

Our Demo

Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (working demo)

Context: Open Music Observatory

You can read the long-form documentation of our plans here.

Our ambition with the development of the Open Music Observatory is to provide the technological basis and a practical roadmap for creating a European Music Observatory in a bottom-up, decentralised way. Instead of waiting for a grand, central agreement on what should a European music observatory be collecting and who should control it, we suggest a pragmatic approach: allow any data owners and collectors who satisfy certain quality and cooperation rules to add their data to an Open Music Observatory; when it reaches a sufficient maturity for use in Europe, then decide if its maintenance requires a new institutional form or not. You can read or regularly updated progress report on this work here.

Creating the Open Music Observatory is a cornerstone task of the Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems (Open Music Europe 2023) Horizon Europe research and innovation project. This task is running till the end of the project (31 December 2025) with the collection, processing, and dissemination of more data and providing innovative, new data services in line with our exploitation pathways. This report is an accompanying document for the creation of Open Music Observatory as a digital infrastructure on the World Wide Web.

The Open Music Observatory is a digital service provider for the music industry that follows the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) definition for such services with a unique governance model. The governance model and the digital service infrastructure represent a unique innovation that considers many good examples from the European Union and other industries.

An observatory has traditionally been a permanent location for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. In the past 30 years, it has also been used for long-term digital data collection programs for markets, social sciences, and humanities. Our milestone requires the start of this observatory after a lengthy and intensive planning and prototyping phase. It can be seen as a modern reimagination of the data observatory model, or the observatory 2.0. We created a new observatory model that fully aligns with the European Interoperability Framework but extends the governance of the digital services beyond public bodies, and allows the creation of a public-private partnership to manage the observatory.

We were informed and influenced by the creation of Europeana (which started out from a similar collaborative project) and their new plans to extend their digital services into the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). We aim fully interoperability with Europeana and ECCCH, but we also bring a new element into their thinking. While they are mainly aggregating the work of public sector memory institutions, we are building a governance model that allows a more successful cooperation among the private sector and the public music sector.

By the end of 2025, we aim to create an “observatory 3.0”, which already hosts many intelligent data improvement technologies and fuels innovative applications/services in line with our project’s exploitation pathways. These services are at different maturity levels, but they could not be brought to a testable MVP without building out the minimal digital infrastructure and governance model at this milestone.

References

Antal, Dániel. 2020. ‘Feasibility Study on Promoting Slovak Music in Slovakia & Abroad’. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6427514.

Antal, Dániel, Michal Grochal, and Christos Varvantakis. 2024. ‘Building a Music Data Sharing Space with Wikibase’. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8046977.

Antal, Dániel, Ádám Lázár, and Andor Kornél Barát. 2024. ‘Open Music Observatory. Progress Report’. Digital Music Observatory. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11564114.

Bianchini, Carlo, Stefano Bargioni, and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo. 2021. ‘Beyond VIAF Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries’. Information Technology and Libraries 40 (2). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v40i2.12959.

BVDA. 2023. ‘Data Sharing Spaces and Interoperability’. Edited by Antonio Kung (Trialog), Ray Walshe (DCU), and Rigo Wenning (ERCIM). BVDA.

Curry, Edward. 2020. ‘Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques’. In Real-Time Linked Dataspaces: Enabling Data Ecosystems for Intelligent Systems, 45–62. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29665-0_3.

D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Strong Ideas. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/.

Diefenbach, Dennis, Max de Wilde, and Samantha Alipio. 2021. ‘[Wikibase as an Infrastructure for Knowledge Graphs: the EU Knowledge Graph]{.nocase}’. In ISWC 2021, 12922:631–47. Online, France: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88361-4\37.

Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission), Pere Brunet, Livio De Luca, Eero Hyvönen, Adeline Joffres, Peter Plassmeyer, Martijn Pronk, Roberto Scopigno, and Gábor Sonkoly. 2022. [Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage: ex – ante impact assessment]{.nocase}. LU: Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/64014.

ESS. 2017. ‘Position Paper on Access to Privately Held Data Which Are of Public Interest’. European Statistical System. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/13019146/13346094/ESS+Position+Paper+on+Access+to+privately+held+data+final+-+Nov+2017.pdf/6ef6398f-6580-4731-86ab-9d9d015d15ae?t=1511447619000.

———. 2022. Privately Held Data Communication Toolkit. 2022nd ed. Manuals and guidelines. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

EU 2019/1024 Open Data Directive. 2019. Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on Open Data and the Re-Use of Public Sector Information. Official Journal of the European Union. Vol. OJ L. http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/1024/oj.

EU 2022/868 Data Governance Act. 2022. ‘[Regulation (EU) 2022/868 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2022 on European data governance and amending Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 (Data Governance Act) (Text with EEA relevance)]{.nocase}’. EUR-Lex. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/868/oj.

EU 2024/1689 Artificial Intelligence Act. 2024. ‘[Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act)]{.nocase}’. OJ OJ L 2024/1689 (July): 1–144. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj.

European Commission. 2017. ‘European Interoperability Framework – Implementation Strategy. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament the Council the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions’. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52017DC0134.

European Commission, and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. 2019. Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2759/346720.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, M Clarke, P Vroonhof, J Snijders, A Le Gall, B Jacquemet, et al. 2020. Feasibility Study for the Establishment of a European Music Observatory : Final Report. Publications Office. https://doi.org/doi/10.2766/9691.

Fagerving, Alicia. 2023. ‘Wikidata for Authority Control: Sharing Museum Knowledge with the World’. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications 5 (1): 222–39. https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.10665.

Hudobné centrum, Reprex B.V., and Slovenská národná knižnica, and Slovenský ochranný zväz autorský. 2024. ‘Memorandum o porozumení vo vzťahu k Slovenskej súhrnnej hudobnej databáze]’.

Ministerstvo kultúry SR, and Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘Memorandum o porozumení o využití výsledkov analýz otvorených politík v kontexte slovenského kultúrneho a kreatívneho priemyslu a sektorových verejných politík v spolupráci s konzorciom pre výskum a inovácie s názvom OpenMuse. $$Memorandum of Understanding on utilizing the Open Policy Analysis results of the OpenMuse Research and Innovation Consortium in the context of Slovak cultural and creative industries and sectors’ public policies$$’. https://www.crz.gov.sk/zmluva/7645338/.

Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘[Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems]{.nocase}’. https://doi.org/10.3030/101095295.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe, research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement No. 101095295 (Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems (Open Music Europe 2023)). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. ↩︎
See the references (Ministerstvo kultúry SR and Open Music Europe 2023; Hudobné centrum et al. 2024) ↩︎
See on the ECCH (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission) et al. 2022) and the European Music Observatory (European Commission et al. 2020); on connecting the (public) European Statistical System with privately-held data: (ESS 2017, 2022); and as a general legal framework the Open Data Directive and the Data Governance Act (EU 2019/1024 Open Data Directive 2019; EU 2022/868 Data Governance Act 2022). ↩︎
You can read more in less technical language about this approach in Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques (Curry 2020), and in a more technical specification in Data Sharing Spaces And Interoperability (BVDA 2023). Reprex is an affiliated member of the Big Data Value Association (BVDA). ↩︎
The knowledge graph of the European Union: (Diefenbach, Wilde, and Alipio 2021); use for cultural authority control: (Bianchini, Bargioni, and Pellizzari di San Girolamo 2021; Fagerving 2023). Our solution: (Antal, Grochal, and Varvantakis 2024). ↩︎
Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI (European Commission and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology 2019); Artificial Intelligence Act (EU 2024/1689 Artificial Intelligence Act 2024). We were greatly informed by Data feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020) on the intersectional escalation of data biases that leads to disadvantages to women, small countries, or independent repertoires. ↩︎

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:16:00 +0100

For a better readability, you can acces this document in HTML, PDF, and EPUB here.

Motivation and Background
Prototype for PPP Knowledge Incubation Into the Wikimedia Ecosystem
- Competency Questions: All Layers of the European Interoperability Framework Applied
- Competency Questions: Involving Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Ecosystem
Policy Alignment and Ethical Governance
References

Motivation and Background

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

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space builds on a previous initiative that unified all known music ever recorded or produced in Slovakia (Ministerstvo kultúry SR and Open Music Europe 2023), in collaboration with a Wikipedian-in-residence. Although Slovak music represents a relatively compact cultural domain, the relevant data was dispersed across numerous public and private institutions—each with its own metadata conventions, languages, and access protocols. This earlier effort showed that even within a narrowly defined area, knowledge integration is complex and labour-intensive—but can deliver substantial impact when institutional silos are bridged and practices aligned.

We now extend this approach into a far more fragile and urgent context: the cultural and linguistic ecosystems of endangered Finno-Ugric communities. Here, we are not simply harmonising open datasets—we are engaging with disappearing cultural universes. These are communities, such as the Livonians or Mari, where the number of fluent speakers and active custodians may be in the dozens. In many cases, the knowledge at risk has never been systematically documented, or exists only in languages and formats that are inaccessible to the communities themselves.

This dual challenge—of endangered knowledge and endangered language—calls for more than technical aggregation. Our platform must support both language-independent conceptualisation (structured metadata, RDF, linked open data) and language-bound revitalisation (cultural narratives expressed in community languages such as Livonian or Seto). A single cultural object—a song, a garment, a photograph—must exist both as semantically linked data and as a living narrative, grounded in linguistic and cultural specificity.

Although our focus is on Finno-Ugric communities, the underlying model is widely applicable. Many domains—such as interwar Slovak modernism or regional Sámi ethnographies—can be described as high-friction knowledge spaces: editorially underdeveloped, institutionally fragmented, and costly to document.

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space provides a blueprint for addressing these challenges. It is a staging environment, interoperable with Wikimedia platforms, where underrepresented communities can collaboratively curate, annotate, and translate their cultural knowledge—on their own terms—prior to integration into the global commons.

Our project idea began to take shape during the Wikimedia CEE 2024 Meeting, where we discussed with Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian Wikipedians how to strengthen the participation of Finno-Ugric minority communities in Wikimedia projects.

Our project idea began to take shape during the Wikimedia CEE 2024 Meeting, where we explored with Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian Wikipedians how to better support participation from minority communities within the Finno-Ugric language group in Wikimedia projects after presenting our data sharing space solution powered by the Wikibase Suite.

While Wikipedia plays a central role in global knowledge-sharing, it is governed by general-purpose policies—such as notability criteria—that can unintentionally marginalise the perspectives, individuals, and artefacts of smaller communities. The narrower and more culturally specific the universe, the more likely it is that meaningful people, events, or objects will fall below notability thresholds, despite their deep significance in local contexts.

To address this, our platform introduces a curatorial layer, currently named WikiGLAM, that enables the creation of virtual exhibitions and contextual collection pages. These pages are not designed to replace Wikipedia articles, but to complement them—providing a format where cultural specificity and community storytelling can thrive, even when individual entries do not meet notability requirements.

For example, while Wikipedia may not support a standalone article for every Seto singer, a digital exhibition titled “The Seto Singing Tradition” could present ten singers, each with images, audio recordings, and biographical context—linked through Wikidata and hosted via Wikimedia Commons. This curatorial model rebalances representation for cultural minorities without compromising Wikipedia’s editorial standards.

Our unfunded project was presented both as a conference paper and a poster at the Digital Dreams and Practices conference (Digital Humanities in the Nordic & Baltic Countries, 2025). A peer-reviewed publication based on this work will be available later this year. You can download the poster in pdf format.

Prototype for PPP Knowledge Incubation Into the Wikimedia Ecosystem

Competency Questions: All Layers of the European Interoperability Framework Applied

To guide the design and implementation of the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, we define the following key competencies the platform must address:

Q1: Define the Scope of the Cultural Universe

The platform is not intended to replicate a general-purpose encyclopedia. For communities like the Liv, with only a few hundred remaining speakers, the informational needs center on the preservation of their specific cultural world: geographic features bearing Liv names, remaining Liv-speaking villages and buildings, garments, oral traditions, folk songs, and the vocabulary needed to describe these in the Liv language. Our system must support the creation and structuring of a domain-specific encyclopedic resource, rooted in the cultural priorities of the communities it serves.

The Finno-Ugric Dataspace should support domain-specific encyclopedic content generation that reflects the cultural worldview and linguistic nuance of the Livonian community, rather than defaulting to general-purpose geographic knowledge as seen in standard Wikipedias. This content becomes the foundation of a Livonian-language encyclopedic resource—complementary to but distinct from global projects.

Q1: generate structured entries

Can the system generate structured entries and multilingual encyclopedic descriptions of culturally significant Livonian geographical locations, using the Livonian Place Name Catalogue as a source, and provide historical variants in Latvian, Russian, and German where available?

From the Livonian Place Name Catalogue, the place Irē (Livonian) / Mazirbe (Latvian) is one of the most significant locations in Livonian cultural memory. The system should be able to: - Represent the Livonian name (Irē), along with Latvian (Mazirbe), and historical Russian and German variants (Мазирбе, Maserwieken). - Link the place to its role in Livonian history and cultural revival (e.g., site of the Livonian House of the People). - Include geographical coordinates and administrative details. - Enable users to generate a short encyclopedia-style page or entry in Livonian, describing Irē’s cultural and linguistic relevance. - Link to associated artefacts, songs, photos, or oral histories from this location.

Q2: Bridge Institutional and Linguistic Silos

Knowledge about stateless or minoritized communities—such as the Seto, Mari, or Liv—is distributed across public and private collections in countries with different national languages (Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, German). These collections are managed under varied knowledge organization models typical to GLAM institutions. Our platform must support cross-lingual and cross-institutional discovery, enabling users to locate and contextualize Seto or Liv heritage materials scattered across multiple metadata regimes and languages.

The goal of the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space is to act as a cross-lingual, cross-domain discovery layer, allowing communities and researchers to access cultural heritage materials scattered across institutions and described in different vocabularies and languages. This enables community members, even without formal archival or linguistic training, to meaningfully engage with their heritage.

Q2 Can the system enable a user—regardless of their language proficiency—to discover and access bibliographic records, archival descriptions, and museum artefacts?

Can the system enable a user—regardless of their language proficiency—to discover and access bibliographic records, archival descriptions, and museum artefacts related to traditional Seto clothing from the 19th and 20th centuries, even when those records are stored in different institutions and described in Estonian, Russian, or German metadata schemas?

A user is researching Seto traditional women’s clothing, including:

The silver brooches and layered aprons worn during ceremonial events;
Garments documented in photographs or field sketches from 19th-century ethnographic expeditions;
Mentions in ethnographic bibliographies, published in Estonian or German;
Museum entries* in databases like MuIS (Estonian Museums Information System) where items are tagged with terms like “Setu rahvarõivad”, “Setu naise kostüüm”, or “женская одежда сето”.

The system should:

Recognize synonyms and multilingual terms (e.g., Setu = Seto, naise rahvarõivad = women’s folk clothing);
Normalize metadata differences across domains (e.g., MARC for bibliographies, ISAD(G) or RiC for archives, CIDOC CRM for museum artefacts);
Return a harmonized set of entries with linked metadata;
Optionally generate a multilingual summary of the findings and enable further semantic enrichment.

Q3: Translate Information into Structured, Interoperable Knowledge

Our system must be able to convert both structured (e.g., datasets, catalogue entries) and unstructured (e.g., books, photos, oral histories) information into semantic, RDF-based knowledge representations. To ensure cross-domain compatibility, we adopt a composite data model drawing from established ontologies: DCTERMS (libraries), Records in Contexts (archives), CIDOC CRM (museums), and copyright ontologies (for streaming platforms and contemporary media). For example, a museum photograph of Seto traditional clothing must be described in a language-agnostic, conceptually robust format that links garments, places, people, events, and creators.

Q3 Etract structured RDF-based statements from mixed-format cultural heritage records

Can the system extract structured RDF-based statements from mixed-format cultural heritage records—such as a museum photograph with a descriptive title and date—and represent them using interoperable, language-independent vocabularies that support integration across library, archive, and museum domains?

Example objects: MuIS Record: Setu mehed Võmmorski külas Setomaa vallas (1913)
Title (Estonian): Setu mehed Võmmorski külas Setomaa vallas
Date: 1913
Institution: Eesti Rahva Muuseum (Estonian National Museum)
Item type: Photograph
Language of metadata: Estonian
Collection domain: Museum (but relevant to archives and cultural ethnography)

From this item, the system should derive:

There exists a photograph as a physical/visual object.
The photograph was created in 1913.
The photograph depicts Seto men in Võmmorski village, in the Setomaa region.
Since the photo is of people in 1913 and is not marked “nude,” it implicitly depicts traditional Seto male clothing.
The image is part of a museum collection.
The location and people depicted have cultural and ethnographic significance.

@prefix crm: <http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> .
@prefix ex: <http://example.org/entities/> .

ex:photo_610034 a crm:E22_Man-Made_Object ; # The photograph as an object
 crm:P2_has_type ex:Photograph ;
 crm:P4_has_time-span ex:year_1913 ;
 crm:P108i_was_produced_by ex:photo_creation_event_1913 ;
 crm:P62_depicts ex:seto_men_group_1913 ;
 crm:P7_took_place_at ex:voemmorski_village ;
 dcterms:subject ex:seto_men , ex:seto_traditional_male_clothing ;
 dcterms:creator ex:estonian_national_museum ;
 schema:inLanguage "et" ;
 dcterms:isPartOf ex:muis_collection .

ex:photo_creation_event_1913 a crm:E12_Production ;
 crm:P4_has_time-span ex:year_1913 ;
 crm:P7_took_place_at ex:voemmorski_village .

ex:seto_men_group_1913 a crm:E21_Person ; # or an instance of E74_Group if individuals not known
 crm:P131_is_identified_by "Setu mehed"@et ;
 crm:P74_has_current_or_former_residence ex:voemmorski_village .

ex:seto_traditional_male_clothing a crm:E28_Conceptual_Object ;
 crm:P2_has_type ex:Traditional_Clothing ;
 crm:P70i_is_documented_in ex:photo_610034 .

ex:voemmorski_village a crm:E53_Place ;
 crm:P87_is_identified_by "Võmmorski küla"@et ;
 crm:P89_falls_within ex:setomaa_region .

Q4: Translate Structured Knowledge into Human-Readable Language

Many small communities lack trained librarians, information professionals, or technical ontologists. Therefore, we must offer tools and workflows that can convert structured data into natural-language descriptions in Liv, Mari, Seto, or other relevant languages. Using computational linguistics and native speaker input, we aim to generate readable, accurate sentences—enabling the production of culturally grounded encyclopedic content, and empowering community members to reclaim access to knowledge historically fragmented and dispersed across external archives.

Expected features

✅ Data grounding: Every part of the sentence can be mapped back to a specific RDF triple or identifier.
✅ No hallucination: The output does not introduce facts not present in the data model.
✅ Domain-appropriate naturalization: The sentence respects cultural terms (“Seto men”, “Võmmorski village”) and avoids overly technical phrasing.
✅ Reference transparency: The institutional source (ERM), identifier, and URI are clearly included.

Q4 Convert structured RDF-based knowledge to culturally appropriate, and verifiable sentences

Can the system convert structured RDF-based knowledge—linking people, places, dates, and artefacts—into clear, culturally appropriate, and verifiable sentences in natural language, such as Livonian, Seto, Mari, or English, grounded in identifiable knowledge items and their provenance?

To offer community members, editors, or citizen curators a tool that:

Selects a set of RDF nodes (e.g., one photo, one person, one location)
Uses predefined or AI-augmented linguistic templates for generating narrative
Outputs fully traceable text in multiple target languages
Allows human validation or post-editing by native speakers

Example Workflow (based on Q3 TTL output):

Structured Input (summarized): - There is a photograph (ex:photo_610034) - It depicts a group of Seto men (ex:seto_men_group_1913) - It was taken in 1913 (ex:photo_creation_event_1913) - In Võmmorski village (ex:voemmorski_village) - It’s part of the Estonian National Museum collection - With item ID: ERM Fk 213:172 - Permanent link: https://opendata.muis.ee/object/610034

Target Natural Language Output (English):

“This photograph, taken in 1913 in Võmmorski village (Setomaa), shows a group of Seto men and is held in the Estonian National Museum under the catalogue ID ERM Fk 213:172. The record is available at https://opendata.muis.ee/object/610034.”

Q5: Enable Legal and Technical Interoperability Across Public and Private Knowledge Sources

Much of the cultural heritage of small and stateless communities is held outside formal institutions—in private collections, family archives, grassroots NGOs, and online platforms. While significant effort has been invested in connecting public libraries, archives, and museums, our platform must also support legal and organizational frameworks that enable data exchange and enrichment between public and private stakeholders. This includes respecting intellectual property rights, cultural sensitivities, and varying levels of openness, while still enabling meaningful integration with Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and other open repositories. Our goal is to create an inclusive data-sharing model that recognizes the distributed nature of cultural custody in small communities.

To goal of or Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space offer legally respectful, semantically rich representation of cultural materials sourced from non-institutional domains—especially those that are digital-first, grassroots-curated, and culturally vital, but fall outside traditional GLAM pipelines. It must make this data linkable and referenceable, even if full reuse is not permitted—thus reflecting the true complexity of the heritage landscape.

Can the system document, enrich, and share information about community-curated cultural materials—such as playlists of contemporary Mari, Udmurt, or Samoyedic music—while respecting intellectual property rights, platform-specific terms of use (e.g., Spotify API rules), and the data-sharing preferences of private contributors or NGOs, and still enable integration with open knowledge platforms like Wikidata or Wikimedia Commons where legally and ethically possible?

Example: The Hõimulõimed Music Collection

A Set of playlists curated by the Hõimulõimed association includes:
Contemporary Mari folk-pop tracks available via Spotify
Experimental Udmurt and Samoyedic music hosted on Bandcamp
Unreleased or privately circulated tracks contributed by local musicians or families

System Responsibilities:

Respect platform licensing

For Spotify, adhere to Spotify’s Developer Terms when pulling metadata via the API
For Bandcamp, respect artist-defined permissions (e.g., embeds allowed vs.not)

Respect NGO & community rights

Hõimulõimed might retain curatorial or community-sourced contextual information
Metadata (e.g., language, artist background, cultural function of the song) should be attributed to them, with a Creative Commons or custom community license as applicable

Semantic alignment with archival and Wikidata models

Describe each track using elements from DCTERMS, FRBRoo, or Schema.org (e.g., dcterms:creator, schema:inLanguage, schema:genre)
Link playlists as curated thematic collections (e.g., schema:isPartOf → “Contemporary Mari Folk Sounds”)

Access control

materials unavailable for full reuse (e.g., non-commercial Spotify tracks) can be indexed, not embedded
For Wikimedia, only materials with compatible licensing (e.g., CC BY-SA) are directly transferred to Commons or Wikidata

Competency Questions: Involving Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Ecosystem

Q6: Integrate Contemporary and Non-Traditional Cultural Expressions

In many cases, the most vibrant and visible expressions of cultural identity are not found in traditional heritage institutions, but on commercial platforms and personal networks. For example, playlists of Mari folk-punk, Udmurt folktronica, or Seto death metal circulate primarily through Spotify and YouTube—not museums or archives. Our system must be able to recognize, document, and link to these contemporary cultural artifacts, treating them as part of the evolving knowledge base. This means supporting metadata ingestion from platforms like Spotify, retaining links to their rich descriptive ecosystems (e.g., genre, lyrics, release context), and providing tools for community annotation, translation, and contextualization.


	The following collections contain musical works that are almost always sung in the given language: Khanty Mansi Musical Works Collection; Samoyedic Musical Works Collection; Livonian Musical Works Collection; Veps Musical Works Collection ;Saami Musical Works Collection; Komi Musical Works Collection; Hungarian Musical Works Collection; Finnish Musical Works Collection; Mari Musical Works Collection; Udmurt Musical Works Collection; Estonian Musical Works Collection; Erzya Moksha Musical Works Collection

Playlists

To goal of the FUD is to empower Wikipedians, citizen scientists and activists to contribute culturally and linguistically meaningful content that is is ethically shared and distributed, and which is curated collaboratively into language preservation resources, including dictionaries, lexeme repositories, and encyclopedic entries.

We also want to contribute to provide best use examples of the Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, the Wikibase Suit, but even more the fledgling Lexeme extension and Wiktionary sister project, because the use of the Lexeme extension is currently lacking really good practices of integration with mainstream computational linguistic projects, and remains a bit cumbersome to work with even with people familar to the Wikibase Cloud or Suit solutions.

Q6 Maningfully transform community-generated cultural expressions into structured knowledge

Can the system meaningfully integrate contemporary, community-generated cultural expressions—such as photographs, videos, oral explanations, and audio recordings—contributed by Liv, Seto, or Mari activists and citizen scientists, and transform these materials into structured, multilingual knowledge that supports Wikimedia’s broader mission in language and cultural preservation?

A Seto speaker uploads to Wikimedia Commons:

A recording of a traditional song, including an oral explanation of its meaning
A short video explaining how a ritual skirt is folded and worn
A written caption or story in Seto, containing several words not yet documented in Wiktionary or Lexeme

The system should:

Ingest and semantically link the media (e.g., via schema:subject, schema:inLanguage)
analyse the spoken and written text to identify potential new lexemes
With expert review, generate: Wikidata Lexemes with grammatical properties (e.g., verb forms, declensions); Wiktionary entries with definitions, pronunciation, example usage.
Link each lexeme back to its attestation context (the song, the ritual, the speaker), preserving linguistic richness and cultural grounding
Allow these outputs to feed back into future encyclopedic articles or WikiGLAM exhibitions in Liv, Seto, Mari, or multilingual format.

Q7: Use Computational Linguistics to Enrich Lexicographic Resources via Lexeme and Wiktionary Integration

The Liv, Seto, and Mari languages are primarily oral, with limited formal grammars or lexicons. Much of the linguistic content connected to cultural heritage—such as song lyrics, object descriptions, or oral histories—is undocumented or inconsistently recorded. Our platform aims to address this gap by using computational linguistic tools to extract structured linguistic data from community-provided texts and audio.

Rather than asking citizen linguists to populate Wikidata Lexemes or Wiktionary pages manually, we design a workflow that enables automated or semi-automated population of these resources. Community narratives, captions, or oral recordings connected to cultural artefacts (e.g., traditional garments, buildings, rituals) are analysed for vocabulary, morphology, and syntax, and the outputs are formatted for compatibility with the Lexeme extension of Wikibase as well as Wiktionary standards.

This approach does several things:

Improves linguistic documentation of small and endangered languages in structured, machine-readable formats;
Links lexemes directly to cultural context, grounding abstract vocabulary in lived practice;
Bridges community knowledge with Wikimedia’s structured linguistic ecosystem, making small languages more visible and semantically integrated.
By doing so, we make the Lexeme extension not just a passive repository, but an active interface between cultural knowledge, language preservation, and structured knowledge production—lowering the barrier of participation while improving linguistic data quality.

To turn cultural expressions from Q6 into linguistically structured outputs that:

Populate and enrich Wikidata Lexeme and Wiktionary
Strengthen formal grammatical understanding of oral or underdescribed languages
Provide community-owned language resources that support both preservation and active use

Q7 Extract structured lexical and grammatical data from contributions

Can the system extract structured lexical and grammatical data from culturally grounded community contributions—such as songs, oral histories, and captions—and use computational linguistics tools to semi-automatically populate Wikidata’s Lexeme extension and Wiktionary entries, supporting formal documentation and visibility of Liv, Seto, and Mari languages?

Q8: Interpretive Layers That Complement Wikipedia’s Notability Criteria

Many elements of small or specialized cultural heritages—such as regional festivals, family-held artefacts, or influential community members—do not meet the general notability criteria required for inclusion in Wikipedia, especially in larger language versions like English. However, these elements are essential to preserving and understanding the cultural world of communities like the Seto or Liv.

Our platform addresses this by supporting curated digital exhibitions and thematic collection pages, such as those developed in our proposed WikiGLAM environment. These exhibitions are not encyclopedic entries per se, but interpretive presentations that provide context, narrative framing, and cultural linkage. They allow, for example, a single page on “Seto Singing Traditions” to present multiple individuals, songs, costumes, and local histories, with appropriate links to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, even if no individual item is independently notable.

This competency ensures that structural inclusion gaps in Wikipedia can be ethically and meaningfully addressed without undermining community norms—by offering a parallel format for expression and representation within the broader Wikimedia ecosystem.

The Finno-Ugric Dataspace should allow and support the creation of a WikiGLAM-style virtual exhibition page, as developed by the Estonian Wikipedia, with embedding of Commons-hosted images and videos; linking each item to its Wikidata entity (e.g., a costume, a festival, a village); bilingual or multilingual narrative (e.g., Seto, Estonian, and English); Attribution to community curators, knowledge holders, and institutions, and a clear URI for citation and long-term access.

### Q8 Can the system support the creation of curated digital exhibitions?

Can the system support the creation of curated digital exhibitions—similar in form to the Müstiline ürgmeri page on Estonian WikiGLAM—that present culturally significant people, objects, and practices (such as Seto traditional costumes) through narrative, multimedia, and thematic storytelling, even when these subjects do not meet individual notability criteria for Wikipedia inclusion?

Our curator, or a museum curator wants to document the evolution of Seto women’s traditional clothing from the 19th century to the present with the inclusion of citizen scientists and Seto activists with the following content, including: - Photographs of garments from museum collections and family archives

Descriptions of how garments were worn, made, and passed down
Personal recollections or quotes from Seto women about their significance
Explanations of the symbolic meanings of specific colors or embroidery
Biographical notes on seamstresses or dancers who wore these clothes

Individually, these elements may not qualify for standalone Wikipedia pages—e.g., a single apron design or the life story of a local seamstress. But together, they form a culturally rich narrative that deserves preservation and visibility.

Policy Alignment and Ethical Governance

While the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space introduces technical innovations in data modeling and interoperability, its deeper aim is to restore governance of cultural knowledge to the communities it concerns. For communities like the Liv, Mari, or Seto—whose cultural heritage is widely scattered and whose languages are endangered—the ability to access, review, and represent their own cultural record is often constrained by external cataloguing practices, linguistic barriers, and institutional gatekeeping.

Our project reimagines data governance not merely as compliance with standards, but as a process of empowerment. We use policy frameworks such as the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the Data Governance Act (DGA) not as goals in themselves, but as tools to support a deeper ethical objective: enabling communities to reclaim agency over how their knowledge is curated, contextualized, and shared.

Making Interoperability Meaningful

The EIF is typically used to guide the design of digital public services across EU member states. We apply it in a new context: community-facing knowledge infrastructures for small-language and niche cultural domains. By aligning legal, organizational, semantic, and technical layers, we enable knowledge to flow across institutional and national borders—making it legible and actionable for the communities it describes. For example, we analyse how a traditional garment might be described differently in archival and library metadata, and we use that understanding to design interoperability that reflects both institutional logic and community meaning. (Curry 2020; EBU and Gaia-X 2022, p16; Nagel and Lycklama 2021)

Making Governance Participatory

The DGA creates legal pathways for data altruism and data intermediation, allowing privately held data to be shared for the public good under new governance models. We build on this by offering a platform where community actors can act as curators, reviewers, and contributors, even when they are not formal institutions. Our system respects provenance, attribution, and usage rights—while ensuring that data about communities is never decoupled from the communities themselves. This aligns with the DGA’s vision of lawful, ethical data sharing, but also extends it toward participatory cultural stewardship.

From Infrastructure to Oversight

Ultimately, we see interoperability and governance frameworks as enablers of ethical oversight, and frameworks of making AI-supported systems like ours trustworthy with real human control. Small and underrepresented communities must be able not only to access what is known about them, but also to critically evaluate and revise that knowledge. They must be able to question categorizations, restore missing context, add language-specific nuance, and share knowledge in the forms and formats they choose. Our staging environment makes this possible by integrating structured data, human-readable language generation, and review workflows that center community consent.

In this sense, the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space is not just a technical platform—it is a prototype for community-led knowledge governance in the digital age.

References

:::::::: {#refs .references .csl-bib-body .hanging-indent entry-spacing=“0”} ::: {#ref-antal_grochal_wikimedia .csl-entry} Antal, Dániel, Michal Grochal, and Christos Varvantakis. 2024. ‘Building a Music Data Sharing Space with Wikibase’. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8046977. :::

::: {#ref-curry_dataspaces_2020 .csl-entry} Curry, Edward. 2020. ‘Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques’. In Real-Time Linked Dataspaces: Enabling Data Ecosystems for Intelligent Systems, 45–62. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29665-0_3. :::

::: {#ref-dataspace_for_cci_2022 .csl-entry} EBU, and Gaia-X. 2022. ‘Dataspace for Cultural and Creative Industries. Position Paper. v.2.0’. Gaia-X. https://gaia-x.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/EBU_position-paper_Media-Data-Space.pdf. :::

::: {#ref-open_music_europe_sk_mou_2023 .csl-entry} Ministerstvo kultúry SR, and Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘Memorandum o porozumení o využití výsledkov analýz otvorených politík v kontexte slovenského kultúrneho a kreatívneho priemyslu a sektorových verejných politík v spolupráci s konzorciom pre výskum a inovácie s názvom OpenMuse. $$Memorandum of Understanding on utilizing the Open Policy Analysis results of the OpenMuse Research and Innovation Consortium in the context of Slovak cultural and creative industries and sectors’ public policies$$’. https://www.crz.gov.sk/zmluva/7645338/. :::

::: {#ref-design_principles_data_spaces_2021 .csl-entry} Nagel, Lars, and Douwe Lycklama, eds. 2021. ‘Design Principles for Data Spaces. Position Paper. Version 1.0.’ Open DEI. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5244997. ::: ::::::::

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

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

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.) Best view with Full screen.

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

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

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.) Best view with Full screen.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

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

Diák navigálása

Az előadás a legjobban a fullscreen üzemmódban követhető:
nyomja le az Ⓕ betűt

Következő: > vagy Space |Előző :️<
Start: Home | Vége: End
Áttekintő nézet: Esc|

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

The slides are best viewed with fullscreen mode:
press Ⓕ

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc|

Data Sharing Spaces for CSRD

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

Enter full screen mode: press the F key on your keyboard

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

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

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

The slides are best viewed with fullscreen mode:
press Ⓕ

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc|

Hackathon Registers of Cultural Entities

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0100

The Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic does not have a register of all existing legal entities in the field of art, culture, and the creative industries, making it difficult to implement measures aimed at the entire sector. Its significance became fully apparent after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic when the ministry needed to target governmental support, but it did not have a complete list of eligible entities.

Existing registers

Sectors of cultural heritage (museums, galleries, libraries) – nearing 100% repletion Art sector (visual arts, theaters, musical entities) – low repletion Sectors falling under KKP (architecture, design, gaming industry) – no registers Publicly available data Register of non-governmental non-profit organizations Commercial Register Finstat Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic

Expected solution

The output of the hackathon should be a document outlining the method of creating an information system (IS) that will contain registers of legal entities whose main activities have an artistic or cultural character, as well as the method of filling it with data and how to obtain, process, and display this data.

Public and private sections Automated data collection from search engines based on entered keywords Manual registration of entities Categorization of entities by cultural sectors Import and export of data Generation of output data for managerial decision-making Creation of galleries, navigation menus, dynamic pages, and widgets Automated processing of statistical results

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

The slides are best viewed with fullscreen mode:
press Ⓕ

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc|

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.

Building Public-Private Data Partnerships

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:48:00 +0000

While open data infrastructures are growing fast, we must bare in mind that private infrastructure is growing at an even faster scale. Last weekend, Europeana had 12,416 sound recordings that you could use without restrictions and altogether, 206,280 music sound recordings were made available over ten years. The same amount is made available with excellent intelligent recommenders and free listening options on Spotify in every 2 days. If we can find ways to connect private and public data infrastructures, the benefits are enormous for all cycles of data curation: in some cases, we can save much cost, and in other cases we can enrich the data and build fantastic new public applications, like we plan to in music libraries.

To put the scale of PPP advantages in a different scope, if we placed the music we handle in Slovakia alone on Europeana in our project, we would double Europeana’s music collection, even though the Slovak Republic accounts for only 1% of the European Union’s population and music creation.

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

PRESS 🇫 KEY ON YOUR KEYBOARD

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

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.) Best view with Full screen.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

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

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

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Fényképeszek és műtermek adatai kutatóknak

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

Diavetítés navigációja

Előre: ️> vagy Szóköz | Hátra :️<
Elejére: Home | Végére: End
Áttekintés: Esc| Jegyzetek (itt nincs): S
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Teljes képernyő: F

🖱 Kiemelt betűk: klikkelhető link A legjobb a Teljes képernyő (F) nézet.

Kérdések?

Kérdezzen: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Antal Dániel | Reprex

OpenProductions

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

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

Questions?

Kérdezzen: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

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.

ImpactFest Roundabout: ESRS Reporting Standards

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:48:00 +0100

Daniel Antal, the co-founder of Reprex, moderated a roundabout with experts on the 8th ImpactFest about the problems around the introduction of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).

What is ImpactFest?

ImpactFest is the leading impact event. The eighth edition of ImpactFest took place in the Fokker Terminal in The Hague.

ESRS

The European Union’s revolutionary new integrated financial and sustainability reporting system will be introduced for about 4100 companies in the Netherlands and about 50,000 companies in the entire EU in 2024/25. Companies will have to connect the environmental and social impact measures of their economic activities with their financial accounting system and with the data system of their suppliers and buyers. In effect, they must be able to report on the whole lifecycle of a product or service.

Daniel Antal started with their own subjective mindmap of the introduction of ESRS, aligning some positive thoughts on the left-hand side and sceptical ones on the right-hand side.

Our Roundabout

Not revealing this mindmap above, the expert participants in the Roundabout engaged in a structured conversation, bringing questions and thoughts from their practice in sustainability consulting (with a social sustainability focus), university research (with a carbon focus) and application development for reporting.

Mindmapping our understanding of the opportunities and problems with the introduction of ESRS from next year.

The shared view on the introduction of ESRS and, generally, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) was that even though just in the Netherlands more than 4000 companies are expected to apply these standards directly from the 2024 business year, and tens of thousands of SMEs in the supply chain will need to supply structured data, there is a very low level of understanding on the requirements. Companies hope that their accountant, auditor, or sustainability consultant will develop a magic tool that will be installed as a plug-in to their ERP system, and it will solve the problem.

Such a magic bullet that will hit all requirements with one shot, of course, does not exist. The aim of any ESG reporting is not to produce a report but to focus the management’s attention on reducing harmful impacts and increasing beneficial impacts on their stakeholders, users, and the broader environment they work in.

At the end of the conversation, we were making educated guesses about how various corporate leaders, including CFOs and heads of HR, will be involved in the process.

Reprex is developing an intelligent, semantic model to connect data in the financial bookkeeping of companies with reliable scientific benchmarks and data sources for benchmarking and target setting and with harmonised survey data for the supply chain data. Our OpenProduction tool prepares such data integration in film and music production. It utilises various OSSH (open source software and hardware) solutions to provide necessary upgrades for ERP systems or to support suppliers to produce information for their corporate buyers, donors for banks and insurance companies in a trustworthy and cost-effective way.

Based on the success of this Roundabout, we will organise short meetups where experts and practitioners can exchange professional views in an informal setting. We’ll set up such meetings in The Hague, Amsterdam and Brussels in the near future. Interested? Get in touch and we will send you a Doodle about possible dates.

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?

Open Music Observatory Technical Report (Versioned)

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

About this Release

This report presents the first technical foundations of the Open Music Observatory.
It was written before consortium partners supplied their datasets and before real data pipelines were stress-tested.

The document outlines the Observatory’s architecture, data governance approach, and integration strategy, but it remains an early edition.

Note: This version is preliminary and should not be cited as a final technical reference. A new, data-driven edition will be released in 2025 once the Observatory has been validated with live data from partners.

Next Steps

The upcoming edition will integrate real-world metadata, copyright, and economic indicators, stress-tested through operational pipelines, and will provide a more complete technical baseline for Europe’s music data space.

Adatterek

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

Navigáció

Következő: ️> vagy Space |Előző :️<
Start: Home | Vége: End
Áttekintő: Esc
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Teljes képernyőn: F

🖱 Kiemelt szöveg: klikkelhető

Kérdések?

Kérdezz: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Antal Dániel | Reprex

Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:48:00 +0100

Tools to connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. As sound recordings, journal articles and books at the same place. Regardless in which country and what type of institution it is catalogued and made available.

We love Wikidata, because we believe in open knowledge, and we believe in linking open data, and Wikidata is the easiest, most open, most accessible way to place information on linked open knowledge graphs.

Linking open data can make songs, films, books, photographs easier to find, to reuse. To connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. The book of War and Peace with the locations in Leo Tolstoy’s monumental work. And then with other locations that were dubbing in the recent BBC adoption of the book. And connect them with the earlier one, filmed in the former Yugoslavia.

Reprex is seeking partners to connect archive and collection inventories automatically, actively rights-managed music, film, and photography catalogues to link public archive, rights management metadata via Wikidata into a self-correcting metadata system, improving and ensuring that machines find the correct information about European or global cultural content. We want to build an open-source tool to make this process automatic and painless.

The BBC’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, much of which was filmed in Lithuania, sparked sparked huge interest in the country abroad. The series featured Vilnius’ Old Town and major sights in Vilnius including Gediminas Castle, Vilnius University and other areas like Trakų Vokė. More than six million British viewers tuned in for its first episode in January.

Our next product is the development of an open source tool (and an app) that brings your reliable catalogue or collection information to the format of Wikidata. It will show what is already known about your collection or catalogue items “on the internet” and selects information that can be filled or improved, and provides a connection to the mass uploader.

A video tutorial on how to use QuickStatements to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

Providing a proper data representation to historically underrepresented groups, like women in the example of bulk updating monument data about monumental women by Dr Sara Thomas, or films from small countries, literature from small languages, or niche genre music is essential in the era of AI. Current global platforms for music, film, books, use machine learning that are trained on large open datasets like Wikidata and connecting sources. These automated systems, like automatic recommendations, will not recommend to suitable audiences this diverse content that lower quality or lacking machine-readable metadata representation.

Links

University of Edinburgh Media Hopper Create: How to use QuickStatements - a tool to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Hannah Rothmann, September 7th, 2020.
Lithuania Tribune: War and Peace tourist trail launches in Vilnius, March 31, 2016.
Wikidata: Linked open data workflow

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +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.

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge

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

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

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

Why connect to your accounting software?

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.

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

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

PRESS 🇫 ON YOUR KEYBOARD (full screen mode)

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

🖱 beige letters: clickable link

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

Cooperation with the Slovak Ministry of Culture and Other Slovak Partners

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0100

Reprex signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, the Economic University of Bratislava, SOZA, and Sinus (on behalf of the Open Music Europe consortium) on utilizing the Open Policy Analysis results.

From left to right: Ľubomír Burgr, Chariman of the Board (SOZA); Dr James Edwards Open Music Europe program director; Ferdinand Daňo, rector of EUBA; Rado Kutaš, state secretary; Tomaš Mikš, SOZA; Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex. Photo: Dominika Semaňáková.

This cooperation is a very important milestone for our company: our reproducible research products will be used in an official national policy context in an EU member state. Our Slovak Music Industry Report has set a best practice within the Slovak Republic.

Our Smart Policy Documents will be used to create the Live Policy Document on Music Economy, on Diversity and Circulation,on Music and Society, and on Music Innovation in a national policy context. We will contribute with automatically refreshed web resources and high-quality indicators about cultural and creative industries, particularly music. Our work will be used to monitor the implementation of the Cultural and Creative Industries Strategy of the Slovak Republic 2030 Stratégia kultúry a kreatívneho priemyslu Slovenskej republiky 2030 national policy.

Reprex’s Smart Policy Documents technology will be used to monitor the national cultural and creative industry policies of the Slovak Republic. See Central Register of Contracts (in Slovak).

This will be the first high-profile national policy use of our Digital Music Observatory. Over the course of three years, in cooperation with our Slovak partners, we would like to persuade more and more national policymakers and also regional actors (like the city of Trenčín, the cultural capital of Europe in 2026) to use this collaborative open knowledge platform as a prototype of a European Music Observatory.

About Data Observatories

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

More than 60 EU, UN, or OECD-recognized data/social science observatories exist worldwide.

Reprex’s data observatories are modern, 21st-century re-imagination of the observatory concept. In the 18-19th century, observatories were the centers of structured observation and data collection about the natural world. Since the 20th century, the EU and UN organizations created or acknowledged about 80 observatories ranging from natural sciences to social sciences and data observatories.

Tartalomjegyzék

New and maturing open data observatories

Digital Music Observatory
Cultural Creative Sectors Industries
Green Deal Data Observatory
Open Collections Net Digitized information and knowledge that is not shaped as datasets: books, texts, still images, sound recordings, films.

Watch Our 2-min Introduction with the example of music. (We do not only work with music data!)

⚙️/ Subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan.

Mission statement

Currently, almost unregulated machine learning is taking over newer and newer roles in human creation, jobs, tasks, and groups with the historically low quantity or quality of data representation are facing a new digital divide. (➡️ project page, slides.)

Our observatories aim to help small businesses, NGOs, foundations, research groups, and universities that do not have a data engineering team and cannot finance large, proprietary data collection and processing programs in social sciences and digital humanities. We help them to access big data, poolin their research needs, and provide open-source access to research automation.

Data feminism: fighting the gender bias of AI is a blueprint to correct other forms of injustice

Human- and machine-readable information about women is less quantity than men: the algorithm can find less suitable audiences for female writers and composers or suggests services or content to female readers.

Cultural and linguistic diversity: AI should not only benefit English-speaking countries and individuals

As books, films, and music is increasingly sold by algorithms on global platforms, inventories and catalogs that are not perfectly machine-readable or not available in English are sidelined by the autonomous recommender or sales systems.

Competitiveness of SMEs, NGOs, small countries, small research groups

Market, policy or scientific researchers who have no reliable access to big data assets and research automation become cannot compete with organizations that employ an army of data engineers, data scientists in research, innovation, or business development.

Services

Our Observatory Data Labs project tries to find new innovation and business models to fight this imbalance (➡️ project page, slides.)

An open-source, linked, open data-driven platform for open science, open government, and the commercial use of open data-driven innovation.
A governance model that complies with the European Data Governance strategy and regulations and provides a good practice of jointly exploiting data and knowledge among public and private, small and large organizations.
An API that fuels a growing range of open-source scientific and statistical software.
A data integration model that allows the joint exploitation of surveys, datasets, statistical data, and business indicators created by a citizen scientist, individual artists, small companies, research groups, and statistical authorities.

Our observatories collect, link, process, validate open data. They are very suitable for market/policy/scientific research organizations (⬇️ join the observatories). We offer open-source scientific and statistical software to exploit our open data and knowledge (➡ Reprex software and rOpenGov.). We are working with an increasing number of innovators who place our open data and open-source software into more friendly, commercial apps which remain affordable for non-profit users (➡ join our Data Observatory Labs.)

The observatories are open collaboration projects, following the principles of open-source software development, open science, linking open data, and the Open Policy Analysis Guidelines. The observatory partners collaborate on various projects that are either self-funded or granted. They jointly create datasets and databases, online collections of digital objects and knowledge, and open-source software.

History & Timeline

2014 CEEMID (2014-2020) is now the Digital Music Observatory(➡ project overview, multi-country research, survey harmonization, European best practice).
2018 First release of iotables, an reproducible research tool.
- why
- rOpenGov
2020 Automated data observatory product/market fit validation
- Early concept of an automated data observatory—blogpost with video.
- Product/Market fit development in the world’s second ranked university-backed incubator, the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Lab (➡ see announcement, Demo Music Observatory, Dutch AI Coalition.)
- First release of retroharmonize, a survey recycling and harmonization tool for better, cheaper, collaborative surveying and data recycling (➡ announcement, benefits.)
2021
- Further concept development in the JUMP Music Market Accelerator program for the music observatory: (➡ announcement, closing) .
- Green Deal Data Observatory concept
- Establishment of the Cultural and Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory as a joint project of IViR (UvA) and Reprex ( website, announcement, collection().)
2022
- Several small projects in the
- Open Music Europe:
- First release of statcodelists and early release of dataset, two R libraries to
- Audience Prize in The Hague Innovators Challenge (➡ blogpost.)
2023
- Kick-off for Open Music Europe
- Data Observatories Lab

Governance & Budget

The observatories do have not a permanent budget, they are currently financed by Reprex and various user projects. Reprex will release a first business plan in June 2023 that contains a long-term public-private partnership plan based on financial, environmental, and social sustainability, and an ethical, inclusive, and open governance plan.

Read more on budgetary and goverance principles

We are considering mainly these documents when we are creating our first long-term business and governance plan:

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure is an important source of inspiration for our plans. We will evaluate the suitability of this model, bearing in mind that our observatories will not only serve scholarly (educational and research) but commercial purposes, too.
Open Data Directive is an important piece of EU legislation. Our observatories were designed to optimalize this legal instrument for in public benefit and for-profit use cases, too.
Data Governance Act is a new EU law that aims to make more data available by regulating the re-use of publicly/held, protected data, by boosting data sharing through the regulation of novel data intermediaries and by encouraging the sharing of data for altruistic purposes. It enters into force in September 2023.
Open Music Europe is an EU-funded project that aims to bring the Digital Music Observatory from a prototype to an EU-recognized, official European Music Observatory. We will experiment with a governance model that follows the EU’s helix-model to serve as a basis of further observatories.
Contributor Code of Conduct is a voluntary code of conduct that all our individual partners, i.e., curators, developers and business developers must accept and follow.

Observatories

Please join one of our observatories:

Digital Music Observatory: This is a maturing project with an increasing number of open and private data assets, users, stakeholders, aiming for an official EU recognition by 2025.
Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Observatory: Our third observatory is currently seeking early collaborators and funded projects to further develop the idea and release a large enough number of data assets with use cases and publications. We want to create a momentum in 2023.
Green Deal Data Observatory: Our second observatory is in an early stage, but the recent adoption of the CSRD Directive and the need for reliable environmental sustainability data will provide us with excellent growth opportunities.
Social Sustainability Data Observatory: this project is in early concept phase.
Competition Data Observatory: this project is in early concept phase.
Open Collections Net: This project is in it inception phase, but it builds on many years of work with music-related collections.

More detailed overview here.

Join

Institutional

Private

Data curator: Help us curate data – tell us what sort of information is missing from your research agenda. Challenge us and collaborate with us in the crafting of valuable datasets that combine domain knowledge with reproducible, open data research practices (how?—contact.)
Developer: the development works are currently carried out by Reprex and the Turku Data Science Group with open-source collaborators (more—contact.)

Eviota Hungary

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 16:30:00 +0100

🇭🇺 magyarul lent — kik vagyunk?

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

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

Why connect to your accounting software?

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.

Magyarul

16:30: Találkozó, üdvözlet
17:00: Rövid prezentáció
17:15: Beszélgetés a vendég cégek adatai alapján

[Igény esetén 12.30-kor egy munkaebéddel egybekötött másik konzultációs alkalmat is tartunk.]

A beszélgetés előtt a vendégeket arra kérjük, hogy (a megfelelő titoktartási nyilatkozat aláírása után) küldjenek el pár főkönyvi kivonatot számunkra. Ez alapján a Reprex elkészít egy egyszerűsített, az éves beszámolóba opcionálisan beilleszhető, kapcsolt fenntarthatósági jelentést. A beszélgetés az érdeklődők valós adatain, számviteli kimutatásain alapul, de semmilyen bizalmas adat nem lesz látható. A beszélgetés célja, hogy valós számviteli alapoktól, egyszerű, egy óra alatt elkészíthető olyan egyszerűsített beszámolót készítsünk, ami segíthet zöld bankhitelek, zöld biztosítások, és fenntartható támogatások igénybevételére.

Egyre több nagyvállalati partner kér ilyen kimutatást akkor, ha a zenei cégek az értékláncukba, beszállítói láncukba kerülnek, vagy támogatást kérnek.
Egyre több EU-s és magyar támogatás fenntarthatósági beszámolóhoz kötött.
Idéntől egyre több bank és biztosító kínál az igazolhatóan fenntarhatóan gazdálkodó cégeknek kedvezőbb kondíciójú hitelt és biztosítást. A zeneipar számára különösen a biztosítási költségek csökkentése vonzó perspektíva.

Data Observatory Labs

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

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

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.)

Jump directly to the work packages:

Or click next for the conceptual overview »

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

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

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

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

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.)

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

LineCheck, Milano, IT

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 15:15:00 +0000

Tartalomjegyzék

Green Deal, this time for real

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex will participate in the panel about on Thursday, November the 24th at 3.15pm about environment and sustainability in the music industry and introduce Eviota, our simplified, connected financial and sustainability reporting tool.

At LineCheck X, you can find out more about our projects

You can get a free, total value chain based sustainability report.
Find out how want to measure better with surveys gender diversity across Europe. And try our test surveys in English or Italian.
We will demonstrate how you can eradicate packaging waste from your music events by making the packaging edible.
And you can find out how we are trying to find where energy is going down the sewage, literally, with Thermowatt and the Green Deal Data Observatory.

Beta test our sustainabilitiy reporting tool

We are looking for beta testers for our simplified sustainability report that is made from your trial balance. We sign and NDA about your accounting data if you test with us, and you can test with older data, too. Beta testing is free.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

The European Commission estimates that the cost of connecting sustainability and finanical reporting will cost on average €10,000 for corporations. We want to bring down the voluntary reporting costs for MSMEs below €500 euro to benefit from green loans, green insurance and other green financing.
It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extended to the management of social sustainability. We are also showcasing harmonized gender inequality data collection with our other project (see below.)

Download our poster presentation.

Digital Music Observatory: survive in the music business without a data engineer

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan. If you are there, please leave a 👍, too :)

We will introduce Surveyharmonies, a survey recycling and survey harmonization tool. You can participate in our international gender bias survey in January 2023. Our team will also participate in the KeyChange Creative Lab on Friday, 25 November at 11.00.
You can learn about our Listen Local project, which helps local music ecosystems remain visible on global platforms.
We will offer you a cup of tea or coffee in an edible cup.

Harmonizing surveys on gender (in)equaliaty

Our Surveymonkey solution is better when you have many languages, or more complex questions, including watching a diagram, or showing a small video clip. It comes with a small fee. The Google Docs solutions (see or English or Italian demo will be offered for free.)

You can create better surveys with less cost: you only need to ask the information, or change of information, that is not included in our harmonized datasets. Shorter, better questionnaires, smaller samples sizes, huge cost savings.
When you make questionnaire-based research, you immediately get a history (the same question asked years ago) and an international comparison (the same question asked in other countries.)
Often you do not even have to pay for the survey, because somebody else has already made a similar taxpayer funded research and we can just get the data for you.

Survey harmonization is a powerful research tool to increase the usability of questionnaire-based empirical research. Read more on our blog.

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.

Tartalomjegyzék

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

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

Reprex Nominated for The Hague Innovators Award

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Reprex was a finalist for The Hague Innovators Award 2022, and the prize of the audience, in the startup category with our respectable competitors, Sibö, WECO, STHRIVE and ECOBLOQ. We won the prize of the audience.

The transition towards a sustainable and inclusive economy depends on collaboration. That is why we are bringing together startups, scale-ups, investors, policymakers, and other impact makers from around the world in The Hague for the 7th edition of ImpactFest.

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan. If you are there, please leave a 👍, too :)

With the The Hague Innovators Challenge, the municipality of The Hague challenges startups, scale-ups, and students to present their innovative ideas for global issues, as described in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The nominees receive a substantive program aimed at further development and the growth of the plan or organization. At the end of the substantive program, all nominees submit a definitive action plan and this is pitched to a professional jury. The jury chooses one winner per category.

Big Data for All: Building Collaborative Data Observatories

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 17:30:00 +0000

Reprex’s co-founder, Daniel Antal talked in the Eindhoven Innovation Café about these issues. You can watch the recorded version of the the livestream that starts at 5 minutes and 22 seconds:

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

The event invitation text and links

Big data and AI creates inequalities. It puts historically marginalized people, like ethnic minorities, and womxn, at a disadvantage. Because AI and checking on AI require plenty of data, usually only giant corporations, the wealthiest governments, and university entities can make it work for them. Reprex is a Hague-based, international startup that wants to impact various sustainable development goals by enabling smaller organizations to join their smaller datasets, use open data, create linked available data, and collaboratively make a change.

Reprex is a finalist for the Hague Innovation Award for impact startup (please 🙏, vote for us!). Daniel Antal, one of the co-founders, will talk about their approach to building an international coalition of music organizations to pool data and challenge data monopolies using organizational techniques, a collaboration ethos, and data from the open-source developer world.

Using the example of independent music creators, who often find themselves in a position where it is more expensive to claim their money from global platforms, he will talk about how to reduce inequalities in the world of big data and AI with collaboration on web 3.0. In the Q&A he will take questions on how to apply their know-how, and generally linked open data to other art+tech or creative segments or problems for which everybody is too small, like meeting the Paris Accord greenhouse gas targets bit by bit, small company by small company.

In the Q&A, we can discuss many things

How can Reprex help an individual creator in music, or in fashion and design, or any other area?
What sort of help it can give to researchers, research institutes, specialist consultancies, law firms, and other knowledge-based actors?

What sort of partners is Reprex looking for in Eindhoven?

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Green Deal Data Observatory and simple, connected, financial and sustainability reporting for creative enterprises and others

Reprex: the impact startup

Check out our accomplishments since the foundation in 2020

Big Data for All: Building Collaborative Data Observatories, Eindhoven, NL

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 17:30:00 +0000

Reprex’s co-founder, Daniel Antal talked in the Eindhoven Innovation Café about these issues. You can watch the recorded version of the the livestream that starts at 5 minutes and 22 seconds:

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

The event invitation text and links

In the Q&A, we can discuss many things

How can Reprex help an individual creator in music, or in fashion and design, or any other area?
What sort of help it can give to researchers, research institutes, specialist consultancies, law firms, and other knowledge-based actors?

What sort of partners is Reprex looking for in Eindhoven?

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Green Deal Data Observatory and simple, connected, financial and sustainability reporting for creative enterprises and others

Reprex: the impact startup

Check out our accomplishments since the foundation in 2020

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!

Music and Creative Industry Indicators from Needs Assessment to Automated Production, Bratislava, SK

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 11:30:00 +0000

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

We would like to present an open invitation for a collaboration to help the Slovak government, the national assembly, and various civil and business societies to build and monitor evidence-based policies based on the experience of the music sector. We will use the Open Policy Analysis Guidelines and the best European evidence-based policy design practice that facilitate the creation and use of transparent evidence in the entire policy cycle from design to ex post evaluation.

In the context of the OpenMuse project within the Horizon Europe framework program we would like to build on the results of the Slovak Music Industry Report and the Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad and show how modern open source statistical software and data science can help the slovak music industry, and more generally, the Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI).

In the 2023-2025 period we would like to develop at least two ‘smart policy documents’ and accompanying live dashboards to present all available data and textual evidence.

The Smart Policy Document template for Music economy, with an emphasis on increasing the value added and employment of Slovak music sector.
The Smart Policy Document template for Music diversity and circulation, with an emphasis on monitoring the music’s national market share in radio, streaming, educations.

Agenda:

Mária Kmety Barteková, PhD will present our Consortium’s ideas on designing policy and key business indicators that fit into the Slovak national creative and cultural sectors and industries policy agenda, and organize the data collection, processing, reporting, evaluation and feedback loop in practice.
Daniel Antal, CFA, the author of the Slovak Music Industry Report, will explain how our building Music and CCSI Data Observatories can help the synchronization of busienss and policy knowledge of the Slovak institutions with global knowledge hubs such as streaming platforms, industry databases, Wikipedia/Dbpedia/Freedb, Music brains, and national libraries.

Slovenská jazyková verzia

Projekt OpenMuse, ktorý tvorí veľké konzorcium partnerov vrátane SOZA a Ekonomickej univerzity v Bratislave, bol úspešný vo výzve Horizon Europe s názvom: Towards a competitive, fair and sustainable European music ecosystem a momentálne je v procese podpise grantovej dohody s Európskou komisiou.

Sme presvedčení, že budovanie európskych hudobných ekosystémov na konkurencieschopnejších, spravodlivejších a udržateľnejších základoch si vyžaduje dôslednú tvorbu politík a obchodné plánovanie založené na dôkazoch. To si zase vyžaduje vyplniť medzery v dostupných údajoch identifikované v štúdii uskutočniteľnosti pre Európske hudobné observatórium (náš predbežný návrh riešenia v rámci projektu Horizont Europe si môžete pozrieť tu.)

Pomocou transparentných metód a nástrojov OpenMuse mapuje oblasť politík a zber údajov; vypĺňa medzery v existujúcich údajoch a umožňuje zainteresovaným stranám a tvorcom politík prijímať opatrenia založené na presných dátach. Projekt OpenMuse je založený na princípoch otvorenej analýzy politík, otvorenej vedy a vývoja softvéru s otvoreným zdrojovým kódom. Spolupracujeme so zainteresovanými stranami na identifikácii medzier v údajoch na úrovni EÚ, na národnej a regionálnej úrovni s cieľom spoluvytvárať relevantné ukazovatele a metódy ich premostenia; vyvíjať bezplatné softvérové nástroje na zber a analýzu údajov; a hlásiť nielen naše zistenia, ale každý krok, ktorý sme podnikli na ich dosiahnutie vo verejne dostupných dokumentoch.

ImpactCity Startup Support XL, The Hague, NL

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Reprex is a research automation company with an international team and clientele. We validated our product/market fit in the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Lab in 2020 and started to build research automation tools for complex data problems with a fast-growing user base and a very high-level international recognition in the EU and the UK. Our dual product offers us to participate in large data platform PPP projects and find growth opportunities in building data-driven commercial applications simultaneously. We want to scale up our operations in the Hague, where we are registered.

Reprex is a finalist for The Hague Innovators Challenge and the prize of the audience.
Download this information in 1 page. | Check out our pitch deck

Our platform solution is a modernized, future-proof, web 3.0 version of the data observatories of the EU, UN, and OECD.

About 60 large data observatories worldwide serve numerous consultancies, universities, NGOs, and other knowledge-based organizations with consistent information collection and processing. We want to power at least 10% of these global knowledge infrastructures in 5 years because we think our technology is superior to almost all of them. By providing essential services to them, we get access to the data ecosystems of prime governmental, academic, and large corporate users. Our central position in one mature and four emerging observatories allows us to provide shared services to for-profit and non-profit organizations that do not have a data science/engineering team.

We also have a compelling proposition to an organization that had built large database systems that became quickly obsolete: we offer them an alternative to rigid relational databases. We provide these organizations with competitive data acquisition, processing, knowledge management, and documentation services, which enables even very small commercial or civil society partners to deploy (ethical) AI.

After winning a very competitive Horizon Europe Research and Innovation tender, we are upgrading our Digital Music Observatory to be an officially recognized, shared data resource of the European music sector.

Our observatories are PPP data ecosystems that create many jobs, not only in our startup but in their city ecosystems, too. As a permanent EU organization similar to the European Audiovisual Observatory, it can create up to 35 crucial knowledge jobs in Strasbourg. We want to join forces with the Hague, the Europeana (the EU cultural heritage body in the Hague), the PAARD, and other actors to make the permanent place of the European Music Observatory in the Hague. This work connects mainly to SGD Goal 5 (detecting algorithmic biases against womxn) and SDG Goal 8 (decent work for creative freelancers and protecting their income from global data monopolies).

We would also like to attract at least one more European or global observatory to the city. Our beachhead/flagship ecosystem is in music. We started expanding towards the related film, gaming, fashion, architecture, and other copyright-based industries. We also discovered function-specific uses that allowed us to go into commercially far more lucrative directions: we started building a computational antitrust and an environmental and social reporting supporting green observatory.

The banking, financial and antitrust regulators are forcing first the 49,000 large EU companies by 2024, then the SMEs and e-commerce platforms to provide auditable accounts of their environmental and social impacts in their entire value chains.

Listen Local Utrecht

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 18:30:00 +0000

Our Listen Local project aims to develop tools that can be used by independent labels and self-releasing artists to make sure that their music finds relevant audiences in their scene, in their geographical environment and abroad.

The purpose of the meetup is to provide an informal setting to get to know each other, or exchange ideas and get into action. RSV on Eventbrite, on Keybase or via the contact form.

We are working with leading EU and UK universities and industry associations to find out why sometimes Utrecht-based music is not recommended to people in Utrecht on streaming platforms? Or how we could build applications that bring the local music ecosystem into the attention of visitors, tourists? Or how we could build games or educational applications that help local youth, pupils, students, educators, with artists in their town, and expand their music discovery to the province, their country, neighboring countries, instead of only recommending a few artists from New York, London, Rio de Janeiro or Seoul.

With the help of MusicAIRE and Horizon Europe, Europe’s premiere research and innovation grant, we are building open source tools to help to solve these problems, or allow other developers to build new applications and games.

Reprex is a member of the Dutch AI Coalition’s Culture and Media Working Group. The Dutch AI Coalition wants to make sure that algorithms work for all. This informal event will take place after the annual gathering of the working group from 9.00-18.00, with working groups members optional visit the Culture AI Lab.

Interested in the Dutch AI Coalition event?

If you are interested in those professional events, get in touch with us on Keybase or via the contact form.

Dutch AI Coalition Working Group Culture and Media

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:30:00 +0200

Reprex presented its Digital Music Observatory and Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory as platforms for developing and evaluating trustworthy AI in the cultural domains. We hope to find new partners within the NLAIC community to join our open, collaborative projects.

We have reviewed more than 80 data observatories in the world, and we are building five modern ones.

It was particularly important for us to get away from the Hague, and meet organizations like DEN and the KB to find out how our ambitious plans could connect to their excellent work. Reprex is a finalist in the Hague Innovators Challenge 2022, and we would like to bring at least one global observatory, the planned European Music Observatory, into our beautiful and smart city. While knowledge graphs are virtual and live in the web 3.0, the Dutch AI Coalition and the country’s future competitiveness need to ensure that essential knowledge graphs will be managed by the ecosystem of Netherlands-based researchers, institutions, and startups. The ethical consciousness shown by the members of our Culture AI Lab shows that it is probably the best for future human generations globally, too.

The SABIO is one of the most interesting in the world and couuld be connected easily with our Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory prototype.

The Culture AI Lab presented a handful of very interesting, ethical and interesting projects. Pressing Matter responds to growing concerns in the Netherlands and Europe about how to deal with the legacies of colonialism in museums and builds innovative tools for museums (and broader society) to address the question of ownership of objects collected in the colonial period. Dr Emily Hansell Clark, former editor of our Data&Lyrics blog, presented the Polyvocal Interpretation of Contested Colonial Heritage project.

Both projects are conceptually and technologically relevant to our Listen Local project. Our project aims to prevent the colonization or start the de-colonization of the local music ecosystem and make local artists of Utrecht, Vilnius, or Sarajevo visible and audible in their own cities’ public spaces or on the smartphones of their town.

The most compelling use case of Listen Local project is finding out why music recommender systems do not recommend some music at all. Or why is it so hard to connect Utrecht-based artists with fans living or visiting Utrecht on the Spotify or YouTube platform? The Responsible Recommenders in the Public Library Sector is looking for similar answers for librarians to avoid all recommendations to visitors pointing to U.S. authors and publishers.

Savvina Daniil’s excellent presentation raised very similar questions to our Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad.

Our deep dive into legislative and regulatory issues of AI highlighted that the past decade unleashed global web-based tools that have the potential to undermine our democratic and cultural cohesion. Reassuringly, we have seen that our thinking about the dangers of AI on European culture and the technological solutions to combat them are very widely shared by NLAIC Culture and Media members. We hope that our partners’ policy work in the Digital Music Observatory and our forming new observatories will support policy design and decision-making that will protect the Netherlands and the EU from some of these threats.

Learn more about the Dutch AI Coalition’s Cultur and Media Working Group (in Dutch:)

Dutch AI Coalition Working Group Culture and Media

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 09:30:00 +0000

Reprex is presenting its Digital Music Observatory and Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory as platforms for developing and evaluating trustworthy AI in the cultural domains. We hope to find new partners within the NLAIC community to join our open, collaborative projects.

Learn more about the Dutch AI Coalition’s Cultur and Media Working Group (in Dutch:)

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

Reprex

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 16:00:00 +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

Reprex: No matter how big is the problem or how small is your team, we fill your reports, dashboards, newsletters, books with data and its visualization.

Connected financial and sustainability reporting based on open data

Eviota: We map your material impacts in your value chain and connect it with environmental or social data that is re-used from the public sector.

Data problems: Reprex

Most SMEs, and civil society organizations do not have a data scientist/engineer in their team, maybe not even an IT person or a HR professional to make such a hire.
When these organizations must solve novel problems, like connecting their financial accounts with environmental and social impact data or connecting to automated transaction systems (like in music), they need novel solutions that do not require managing a database within their organization.

Data problems: Eviota

Most SMEs, and civil society organizations do not have a data scientist/engineer in their team, maybe not even an IT person or a HR professional to make such a hire.
To access green bank loans, insurance products, subsidies, or investments, or to keep track of their sustainability goals in line with the Paris Accord or gender equality plan, organizations must connect their accounting system to external environmental data. We connect their accounts with impact estimates from reliable scientific sources.

Data problems (examples)


	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.

Our solution: Reprex

We create data ecosystems with the modernization of the EU/OECD/UN-endorsed 'data observatory' concept. Our data observatory 3.0 uses the knowledge graphs of the web of data.
We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. Our approach significantly reduces the cost of data acquisition and opens invisible, reliable governmental and scientific data sources. We are currently building five observatories, and one of them is already mature enough to be considered for official EU recognition (serving the music industry).
We provide applications, for example, our Eviota application, which connects financial accounts with environmental and social data, and crates reliable indicators and benchmarks for the requirements of the sustainable finance package.

Our solution: Eviota (Non-Financial)

We create data ecosystems with the modernization of the EU/OECD/UN-endorsed 'data observatory' concept. Our Green Deal Data Observatory uses the knowledge graphs of the web of data and gives access to reliable, often unseen, hard-to-access ESG data sources.
We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. Our approach significantly reduces the cost of data acquisition and opens invisible, reliable governmental and scientific data sources.
We provide applications, for example, our Eviota application, which connects financial accounts with environmental and social data, and crates reliable indicators and benchmarks for the requirements of the sustainable finance package. Unlike our competitors, we can serve SMEs, too, at a competitive cost.

Our solution: Eviota (For Banks)

We create data ecosystems with the modernization of the EU/OECD/UN-endorsed 'data observatory' concept. Our Green Deal Data Observatory uses the knowledge graphs of the web of data and gives access to reliable, often unseen, hard-to-access ESG data sources.
We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. Our approach significantly reduces the cost of data acquisition and opens invisible, reliable governmental and scientific data sources.
We provide applications, for example, our Eviota application, which connects financial accounts with environmental and social data, and crates reliable indicators and benchmarks for the requirements of the sustainable finance package. We are validating our product in the regulatory sandbox of a central bank to show that we provide a cost-effective solution to many regulatory problems opened by the new [sustainable finance package of the EU](https://finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/sustainable-finance-package_en).

UNIIQ

Objectives, including product roadmap (technology/time/money)
Schematic overview of developments since inception

Market

Competition

Know-how and integration of open source components

Reprex has a special know-how to map and connect private datasets managing the boundaries of organizations that often have conflicting interests. Our know-how was developed over 10 years, and the data of about 60, often conflicting music industry actors in 12 countries.
Our team has many years of experience with working public sector information reuse, or 'open data', and have built reliable open source software to process legally open, not readily downloadable, and very valuable information that is not available for market vendors.
We use RDF (linked open data) and other technologies to link scattered small data to big data; we use our own R libraries to test and process various data into reliable statistical data or indicators.
Based on our unique data access and software we are developing the Eviota App to connect financial accounts and environmental, social and governance data.

Team [rewrite with GDO]


	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.

Timeline

Inception: Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Product Market Fit Validation with the Digital Music Observatory
New observatory development started with computational antitrust, ESG reporting, and
Several, peer reviewed software releases
DMO has more than 20 curators, 3 million euro budget for 3 years, increasing user base.
Eviota and the Green Deal

We are part of rOpenGov and have access to very special knowledge working with national accounts data and ESG data used by governments to keep track with the Paris Accord. We can access data cheaper, faster, better than our competitors.
We have a know-how to manage conflicts of interest and very complex data use rights.

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.	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.
Our existing observatories give us access to the market and public surveying markets (cc € 30-40 bn in the developed nations), particularly to its software component (€ 10 billion euros).	retroharmonize integrates pre-existing questionnaire-based surveys and new surveys. We see interest from the biggest global players.
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.	Connected ESG reporting has a €4 bn market in the EU alone, and our Eviota product is very competitive. Due to regulatory pressure, we can harvest a decent share if we are able to attract venture capital.

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.

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.

Our existing observatories give us access to the market and public surveying markets (cc € 30-40 bn in the developed nations), particularly to its software component (€ 10 billion euros).

retroharmonize integrates pre-existing questionnaire-based surveys and new surveys. We see interest from the biggest global players.

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.

Connected ESG reporting has a €4 bn market in the EU alone, and our Eviota product is very competitive. Due to regulatory pressure, we can harvest a decent share if we are able to attract venture capital.

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


💻 Our free scientific software products have a steadily growing user base (several thousand users globally.)
📈 We are able to convert this to paying research automation services at a higher growth rate.
🚀 We won four competitive tenders this year, but we feel that the slow tendering/acquisition/cash cycle is hampering our growth, we see far more opportunities that we can serve. Therefore we are looking for investors.

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
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.

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

Home - One Pager ImpactCity Startup Support XL

Listen Local Lithuania, Vilnius, LT

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 14:30:00 +0000

Daniel Antal will introduce Listen Local Lithuania, a new offspring of the Digital Music Observatory’s trustworthy AI program, Listen Local, and show what artists, managers, labels, and cultural policymakers can do to ideas about balancing the post-Covid revenues with increased sales on global platforms.

Based on our experience in Slovakia (see: Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad), and new data from Lithuania and Ukraine we show what data management problems make the Lithuanian music invisible for the AI algorithms of YouTube, Spotify and other platforms; how artists from Vilnius or Kaunas can find their new release on Forgetify, and app that plays songs that were never played. We show why music revenues decreased in the past years for independent and small country catalogues, and we give practical advice on increasing the value and visibility of the Lithuanian music repertoire. We show an open, data federation model to connect the Lithuanian national library the system of collective management, distributors, and small data of artists and labels.

Prepare your questions

Do you want to know why your music is not recommended by streaming platforms? Are you interested in finding new Lithuanian music that fits into your radio or festival programming but your are stuck? You can send questions prior to the conference to the speaker, Daniel Antal, and we’ll address your problem with examples in the talk.

Opt-in

You can opt-in into our database before or during the conference, and we will give you tailored analysis about your data quality, and your opportunities to place your music to new audiences in Lithuania and abroad.

Venue

The talk will be in the what’s next in music conference or follow them on Facebook. Participation is free but requires registration. (We will post shortly more details on this.)

The time set for the talk is EEST Vilnius time (GMT+02.00).

Not available?

You can meet the project’s manager and the speaker on 10 September in Kaunas, at the closing event of what’s next in music.

Background

Listen Local Lithuania is supported by the European Union’s MusicAIRE, an EU-funded project that aims to provide tailored-made instruments for the sector and contribute to a green, digital, just, and resilient recovery of the music ecosystem. It is managed by MXF in collaboration with Music Export Ukraine and Reprex.

MXF and the outcomes of the Listen Local Lithuania will participate in the OpenMusE project, an international research and innovation project with prestigious universities, music industry stakeholders, collective management organizations, and innovative SMEs to design tools that promote the diversity of music on global platforms, increase the revenues and decrease the data costs of music organizations, provide cultural policymakers with the Open Policy Analysis framework the first time in Europe. This open collaboration project funded for 2023-2025 is open for small and large music organizations, collective management organizations, libraries, and cultural policymakers.

Listen Local Lithuania

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

Invitation for an open collaboration

Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local Lithuania

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

Lithuanian creators, including music creators, should earn as much as the European average. Their income should level up to German and Finnish levels.
Lithuanian people should find good Lithuanian music in Lithuania on Spotify, YouTube and the radio. Foreign labels must not increase their market share and colonize the local creative ecosystem.

Joining the European Union

Why should creators earn less than other skilled occupations and knowledge workers?
Why should artists get less paid than the average in Lithuania?
Why should Lithuanians get paid less than the average European?

Income & empirical comparisons | Setting the Value of Lithuanian Music

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

Download in English | | Download in Slovak

Lithuania is no different

There are initiatives in the progress: LATGA already improved the rights management for one part of the composer’s rights management, MIC has more than 400 profiles in their database online, LMVA already lobbied for quotas, the Kūrybiškos Europos biuras has bright funding ideas, and the country has a respected national library.

There are facts and ideas: Muzikos sritis - Ekspertinio vertinimo ataskaita | ArtTech – galimybės Lietuvos kultūros ir kūrybinių industrijų sektoriui. Rekomendacijos

Still a lot to do

Still much to do: revaluing music requires a cooperation of all rightsholders, making sure that the AI systems of streaming services work well requires linking (elements of) the existing databases, probably via the library, to web of data to sync knowledge into the global global databases about Lithuania. Plenty of education needed how to revalue, claim money or defend the country from dark algorithms.

Open Polcy Analysis

Open Policy Brief

Trustworthy Cultural AI: make big data work for Lithuania artists and small labels, publishers and CCIs
Synchronize the (meta)data of Lithuania heritage and present cultural production as linked open data, so that autonomous systems of Spotify, YouTube, Wikipedia, Library of Congress, etc, can read it.
Practical, open source solutions that can immediately applied
Access to the OpenMuse know-how

LaLa Database

Opt-in, opt-out database to make sure that you are in control
Health check of artist data from Wikipedia to YouTube
Make changes that avoid missing payments, recommendations errors.

Listen Local Database

Write-in database that we do not forget about any new or legacy artists, crowdsourcing for fans, journalists, musicians, educators to add artists, bands, ensembles
Minimum requirement one commercially released recording, one published music composition, a Wikipedia page. Other commercially not released artists, or their heirs must explicitly register to LaLa (if they are not public, GDPR applies)

Topics:
 - European AI regulation and ethics, music AI,
 - non-discriminiation and fair remuneration for
 Lithuania'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.

Invitation for an open collaboration

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

Questions?

Get in Touch: Daniel - Valuations, Metadata, AI Policy | Ioanna - Fashion & Blockchain | Borbala - Fair competition and fighting dark algorithms | Mark - MXF

Market analysis

Local content regulation & goals

Unpaid revenue rate
Local content regulations for radios
Goal setting on streaming

Avoiding negative outcomes

Trustworthy AI

Data biases

The data about the Lithuanian national cultural output and heritage shoulld be availabe in Lithuania
Should be daily synchronized with the world via the Europena, Dbpedia, MusicBrainz and other open linked data solutions that connect YouTube, Spotify, and other platforms to daily, up-to-date knowledge to train their algorithms.
AI is machine learning

Listen Local Lithuania

open linked data: We aim to sync with AGATA, LATGA, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, MIC and internationally via the Europeana, Music Brainz and Zenodo with global libraries, music services, and scientic repositories.
open and smart policies: In sync with the the Cultural Ministry of Lithuania, providing a blueprint for film, television, books, newspapers, fashion, architecture, design and other cultural and creative industries.

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

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!

How We Add Value to Public Data With Better Curation And Documentation?

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 09:00:00 +0000

In this example, we show a simple indicator: the Turnover in Radio Broadcasting Enterprises in many European countries. This is an important demand driver in the Music economy pillar of our Digital Music Observatory, and important indicator in our more general Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory. Of course, if you work with competition policy or antitrust, than any industry may be interesting to you–but not all of them are well-serverd with data.

This dataset comes from a public datasource, the data warehouse of the European statistical agency, Eurostat. Yet it is not trivial to use: unless you are familiar with national accounts, you will not find this dataset on the Eurostat website.

The data can be retrieved from the Annual detailed enterprise statistics for services NACE Rev.2 H-N and S95 Eurostat folder.

Our version of this statistical indicator is documented following the FAIR principles: our data assets are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. While the Eurostat data warehouse partly fulfills these important data quality expectations, we can improve them significantly. And we can also improve the dataset, too, as we will show in the next blogpost.

Tartalomjegyzék

Findable Data

Our data observatories add value by curating the data–we bring this indicator to light with a more descriptive name, and we place it in a domain-specific context with our Digital Music Observatory and Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and a policy-specific context with our Competition Data Observatory and Green Deal Data Observatory. While many people may need this dataset in the creative sectors, or among cultural policy designers, most of them have no training in working with national accounts, which imply decyphering national account data codes in records that measure economic activity at a national level. Our curated data observatories bring together many available data around important domains. Our Digital Music Observatory, for example, aims to form an ecosystem of music data users and producers.

We added descriptive metadata that help you find our data and match it with other relevant data sources.

We added descriptive metadata that help you find our data and match it with other relevant data sources. For example, we add keywords and standardized metadata identifiers from the Library of Congress Linked Data Services, probably the world’s largest standardized knowledge library description. This ensures that you can find relevant data around the same key term ("Radio broadcasting") in addition to our turnover data. This allows connecting our dataset unambiguously with other information sources that use the same concept, but may be listed under different keywords, such as Radio–Broadcasting, or Radio industry and trade, or maybe Hörfunkveranstalter in German, or Emitiranje radijskog programa in Croatian or Actividades de radiodifusão in Portugese.

Accessible Data

Our data is accessible in two forms: in csv tabular format (which can be read with Excel, OpenOffice, Numbers, SPSS and many similar spreadsheet or statistical applications) and in JSON for automated importing into your databases. We can also provide our users with SQLite databases, which are fully functional, single user relational databases.

Tidy datasets are easy to manipulate, model and visualize, and have a specific structure: each variable is a column, each observation is a row, and each type of observational unit is a table. This makes the data easier to clean, and far more easier to use in a much wider range of applications than the original data we used. In theory, this is a simple objective, yet we find that even governmental statistical agencies–and even scientific publications–often publish untidy data. This poses a significant problem that implies productivity loses: tidying data will require long hours of investment, and if a reproducible workflow is not used, data integrity can also be compromised: chances are that the process of tidying will overwrite, delete, or omit a data or a label.

Tidy datasets are easy to manipulate, model and visualize, and have a specific structure: each variable is a column, each observation is a row, and each type of observational unit is a table.

While the original data source, the Eurostat data warehouse is accessible, too, we added value with bringing the data into a tidy format. Tidy data can immediately be imported into a statistical application like SPSS or STATA, or into your own database. It is immediately available for plotting in Excel, OpenOffice or Numbers.

Interoperability

Our data can be easily imported with, or joined with data from other internal or external sources.

All our indicators come with standardized descriptive metadata, and statistical (processing) metadata. See our API

All our indicators come with standardized descriptive metadata, following two important standards, the Dublin Core and DataCite–implementing not only the mandatory, but the recommended descriptions, too. This will make it far easier to connect the data with other data sources, e.g. turnover with the number of radio broadcasting enterprises or radio stations within specific territories.

Our passion for documentation standards and best practices goes much further: our data uses Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange standardized codebooks, unit descriptions and other statistical and administrative metadata.

Reuse

All our datasets come with standardized information about reusabililty. We add citation, attribution data, and licensing terms. Most of our datasets can be used without commercial restriction after acknowledging the source, but we sometimes work with less permissible data licenses.

In the case presented here, we added further value to encourage re-use. In addition to tidying, we significantly increased the usability of public data by handling missing cases. This is the subject of our next blogpost.

Are you a data user? How could we serve you better?

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 get in touch with us!

How We Add Value to Public Data With Imputation and Forecasting

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0100

Public data sources are often plagued by missng values. Naively you may think that you can ignore them, but think twice: in most cases, missing data in a table is not missing information, but rather malformatted information. This approach of ignoring or dropping missing values will not be feasible or robust when you want to make a beautiful visualization, or use data in a business forecasting model, a machine learning (AI) applicaton, or a more complex scientific model. All of the above require complete datasets, and naively discarding missing data points amounts to an excessive waste of information. In this example we are continuing the example a not-so-easy to find public dataset.

In the previous blogpost we explained how we added value by documenting data following the FAIR principle and with the professional curatorial work of placing the data in context, and linking it to other information sources, such as other datasets, books, and publications, regardless of their natural language (i.e., whether these sources are described in English, German, Portugese or Croatian). Photo: Jack Sloop.

Completing missing datapoints requires statistical production information (why might the data be missing?) and data science knowhow (how to impute the missing value.) If you do not have a good statistician or data scientist in your team, you will need high-quality, complete datasets. This is what our automated data observatories provide.

Tartalomjegyzék

Why is data missing?

International organizations offer many statistical products, but usually they are on an ‘as-is’ basis. For example, Eurostat is the world’s premiere statistical agency, but it has no right to overrule whatever data the member states of the European Union, and some other cooperating European countries give to them. And they cannot force these countries to hand over data if they fail to do so. As a result, there will be many data points that are missing, and often data points that have wrong (obsolete) descriptions or geographical dimensions. We will show the geographical aspect of the problem in a separate blogpost; for now, we only focus on missing data.

Some countries have only recently started providing data to the Eurostat umbrella organization, and it is likely that you will find few datapoints for North Macedonia or Bosnia-Herzegovina. Other countries provide data with some delay, and the last one or two years are missing. And there are gaps in some countries’ data, too.

See the authoritative copy of the dataset.

This is a headache if you want to use the data in some machine learning application or in a multiple or panel regression model. You can, of course, discard countries or years where you do not have full data coverage, but this approach usually wastes too much information–if you work with 12 years, and only one data point is available, you would be discarding an entire country’s 11-years’ worth of data. Another option is to estimate the values, or otherwise impute the missing data, when this is possible with reasonable precision. This is where things get tricky, and you will likely need a statistician or a data scientist onboard.

What can we improve?

Consider that the data is only missing from one year for a particular country, 2015. The naive solution would be to omit 2015 or the country at hand from the dataset. This is pretty destructive, because we know a lot about the radio market turnover in this country and in this year! But leaving 2015 blank will not look good on a chart, and will make your machine learning application or your regression model stop.

A statistician or a radio market expert will tell you that you know more-or-less the missing information: the total turnover was certainly not zero in that year. With some statistical or radio domain-specific knowledge you will use the 2014, or 2016 value, or a combination of the two and keep the country and year in the dataset.

Our improved dataset added backcasted (using the best time series model fitting the country’s actually present data), forecasted (again, using the best time series model), and approximated data (using linear approximation.) In a few cases, we add the last or next known value. To give a few quantiative indicators about our work:

Increased number of observations: 65%
Reduced missing values: -48.1%
Increased non-missing subset for regression or AI: +66.67%

If your organization is working with panel (longitudional multiple) regressions or various machine learning applications, then your team knows that not havint the +66.67% gain would be a deal-breaker in the choice of models and punctuality of estimates or KPIs or other quantiative products. And that they would spent about 90% of their data resources on achieving this +66.67% gain in usability.

If you happen to work in an NGO, a business unit or a research institute that does not employ data scientists, then it is likely that you can never achieve this improvement, and you have to give up on a number of quantitative tools or visualizations. If you have a data scientist onboard, that professional can use our work as a starting point.

Can you trust our data?

We believe that you can trust our data better than the original public source. We use statistical expertise to find out why data may be missing. Often, it is present in a wrong location (for example, the name of a region changed.)

If you are reluctant to use estimates, think about discarding known actual data from your forecast or visualization, because one data point is missing. How do you provide more accurate information? By hiding known actual data, because one point is missing, or by using all known data and an estimate?

Our codebooks and our API uses the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange documentation standards to clearly indicate which data is observed, which is missing, which is estimated, and of course, also how it is estimated. This example highlights another important aspect of data trustworthiness. If you have a better idea, you can replace them with a better estimate.

Our indicators come with standardized codebooks that do not only contain the descriptive metadata, but administrative metadata about the history of the indicator values. You will find very important information about the statistical method we used the fill in the data gaps, and even link the reliable, the peer-reviewed scientific, statistical software that made the calculations. For data scientists, we record the plenty of information about the computing environment, too-–this can come handy if your estimates need external authentication, or you suspect a bug.

Avoid the data Sisyphus

If you work in an academic institution, in an NGO or a consultancy, you can never be sure who downloaded the Annual detailed enterprise statistics for services (NACE Rev. 2 H-N and S95) Eurostat folder from Eurostat. Did they modify the dataset? Did they already make corrections with the missing data? What method did they use? To prevent many potential problems, you will likely download it again, and again, and again…

See our The Data Sisyphus blogpost.

We have a better solution. You can always rely on our API to import directly the latest, best data, but if you want to be sure, you can use our regular backups on Zenodo. Zenodo is an open science repository managed by CERN and supported by the European Union. On Zenodo, you can find an authoritative copy of our indicator (and its previous versions) with a digital object identifier, in this case, 10.5281/zenodo.5652118. These datasets will be preserved for decades, and nobody can manipulate them. You cannot accidentally overwrite them, and we have no backdoor access to modify them.

Get the data

How can we do better?

Are you a data user?

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 get in touch with us!

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.

Digital Music Observatory on the MaMA Convention 2021, Paris, FR

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Currently more than half of the global music sales are made by autonomous AI systems owned by Google, Apple, or Spotify. These data monopolies are getting rich, because they reap the profit from music businesses with an average employee count of 1.8 Europe. European music businesses are easy to exploit with armies of data engineers and data scientists because they do not have a single data scientist or even an IT function.

Artists in the UK had a difficulty explaining in Westminster how they are losing out in streaming– so we have created a streaming price index, like the Dow Jones, if you like, that explains the economic factors of the devaluation of music in the last 5 years in 20 countries. (See our report.)
Music organizations in Slovakia and Hungary were frustrated that their politicians and journalists believed music to be taxpayer funded, so we showed with data that they contribute more proportionally to the national budget than car manufacturers, the darling of local politicians (See our reports in Hungary (recast several times) and in Slovakia.)
We successfully challenged with data restaurant associations, hotel chains, telecom corporations and broadcasters who wanted to bring music prices down in court and via lobbying.

The music industry has envied the television and film industry which has a single go-to-point for data when it needs them, the European Audiovisual Observatory. It started lobbying for a publicly financed music observatory. But we did not wait. The music industry has a tragic track record of failed centralized international data projects. We built Reprex out of a 12-country, decentralized music project. We learned how to utilize hidden, but already existing data and research funds well, and how to manage the data governance among the poisonous conflicts of interests between rich and poor countries, authors vs producers, producer’s vs performers.

Our Digital Music Observatory is not theoretical, it is practical, because it is built around real-life court cases, damage claims, lobbying and PR arguments.
Our Digital Music Observatory is comprehensive – it contains more than a thousand indicators from all European countries. We have enough data to test the biases of the Spotify or the YouTube algorithm – you would be surprised what the data tells us.
It has data available much sooner, in much higher quality and in a more practical format than in the Audiovisual one.

Presentation Slides

You can see the presentation slides here.

An Empirical Analysis of Music Streaming Revenues and Their Distribution

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0000

This report was commissioned by the Music Creators’ Earnings Project to provide an empirical analysis of music streaming revenues in the UK.

It showed that:

total market growth often hides flat or declining individual earnings,
exchange rate effects played a major role in sustaining incomes during 2015–2019,
and current remuneration schemes and pro-rata distribution systems do not adequately reflect the value of music for most rightsholders.

The study argued for international data harmonisation, better survey methods, and policy coordination to make earnings more transparent and equitable.

📄 Full report PDF
📄 Zenodo record

Economic and Environment Impact Analysis, Automated for Data-as-Service

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 16:00:00 +0000

We have released a new version of iotables as part of the rOpenGov project. The package, as the name suggests, works with European symmetric input-output tables (SIOTs). SIOTs are among the most complex governmental statistical products. They show how each country’s 64 agricultural, industrial, service, and sometimes household sectors relate to each other. They are estimated from various components of the GDP, tax collection, at least every five years.

SIOTs offer great value to policy-makers and analysts to make more than educated guesses on how a million euros, pounds or Czech korunas spent on a certain sector will impact other sectors of the economy, employment or GDP. What happens when a bank starts to give new loans and advertise them? How is an increase in economic activity going to affect the amount of wages paid and and where will consumers most likely spend their wages? As the national economies begin to reopen after COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, is to utilize SIOTs to calculate direct and indirect employment effects or value added effects of government grant programs to sectors such as cultural and creative industries or actors such as venues for performing arts, movie theaters, bars and restaurants.

Making such calculations requires a bit of matrix algebra, and understanding of input-output economics, direct, indirect effects, and multipliers. Economists, grant designers, policy makers have those skills, but until now, such calculations were either made in cumbersome Excel sheets, or proprietary software, as the key to these calculations is to keep vectors and matrices, which have at least one dimension of 64, perfectly aligned. We made this process reproducible with iotables and eurostat on rOpenGov

Our iotables package creates direct, indirect effects and multipliers programatically. Our observatory will make those indicators available for all European countries.

Accessing and tidying the data programmatically

The iotables package is in a way an extension to the eurostat R package, which provides a programmatic access to the Eurostat data warehouse. The reason for releasing a new package is that working with SIOTs requires plenty of meticulous data wrangling based on various metadata sources, apart from actually accessing the data itself. When working with matrix equations, the bar is higher than with tidy data. Not only your rows and columns must match, but their ordering must strictly conform the quadrants of the a matrix system, including the connecting trade or tax matrices.

When you download a country’s SIOT table, you receive a long form data frame, a very-very long one, which contains the matrix values and their labels like this:

## Table naio_10_cp1700 cached at C:\Users\...\Temp\RtmpGQF4gr/eurostat/naio_10_cp1700_date_code_FF.rds
# we save it for further reference here
saveRDS(naio_10_cp1700, "not_included/naio_10_cp1700_date_code_FF.rds")
# should you need to retrieve the large tempfiles, they are in
dir (file.path(tempdir(), "eurostat"))
dplyr::slice_head(naio_10_cp1700, n: 5)
## # A tibble: 5 x 7
## unit stk_flow induse prod_na geo time values
## <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl>
## 1 MIO_EUR DOM CPA_A01 B1G EA19 2019-01-01 141873.
## 2 MIO_EUR DOM CPA_A01 B1G EU27_2020 2019-01-01 174976.
## 3 MIO_EUR DOM CPA_A01 B1G EU28 2019-01-01 187814.
## 4 MIO_EUR DOM CPA_A01 B2A3G EA19 2019-01-01 0
## 5 MIO_EUR DOM CPA_A01 B2A3G EU27_2020 2019-01-01 0

The metadata reads like this: the units are in millions of euros, we are analyzing domestic flows, and the national account items B1-B2 for the industry A01. The information of a 64x64 matrix (the SIOT) and its connecting matrices, such as taxes, or employment, or C**O₂ emissions, must be placed exactly in one correct ordering of columns and rows. Every single data wrangling error will usually lead in an error (the matrix equation has no solution), or, what is worse, in a very difficult to trace algebraic error. Our package not only labels this data meaningfully, but creates very tidy data frames that contain each necessary matrix of vector with a key column.

iotables package contains the vocabularies (abbreviations and human readable labels) of three statistical vocabularies: the so called COICOP product codes, the NACE industry codes, and the vocabulary of the ESA2010 definition of national accounts (which is the government equivalent of corporate accounting).

Our package currently solves all equations for direct, indirect effects, multipliers and inter-industry linkages. Backward linkages show what happens with the suppliers of an industry, such as catering or advertising in the case of music festivals, if the festivals reopen. The forward linkages show how much extra demand this creates for connecting services that treat festivals as a ‘supplier’, such as cultural tourism.

Let’s seen an example

## Downloading employment data from the Eurostat database.
## Table lfsq_egan22d cached at C:\Users\...\Temp\RtmpGQF4gr/eurostat/lfsq_egan22d_date_code_FF.rds

and match it with the latest structural information on from the Symmetric input-output table at basic prices (product by product) Eurostat product. A quick look at the Eurostat website already shows that there is a lot of work ahead to make the data look like an actual Symmetric input-output table. Download it with iotable_get() which does basic labelling and preprocessing on the raw Eurostat files. Because of the size of the unfiltered dataset on Eurostat, the following code may take several minutes to run.

sk_io <- iotable_get ( labelled_io_data: NULL,
source: "naio_10_cp1700", geo: "SK",
year: 2015, unit: "MIO_EUR",
stk_flow: "TOTAL",
labelling: "iotables" )
## Reading cache file C:\Users\..\Temp\RtmpGQF4gr/eurostat/naio_10_cp1700_date_code_FF.rds
## Table naio_10_cp1700 read from cache file: C:\Users\..\Temp\RtmpGQF4gr/eurostat/naio_10_cp1700_date_code_FF.rds
## Saving 808 input-output tables into the temporary directory
## C:\Users\...\Temp\RtmpGQF4gr
## Saved the raw data of this table type in temporary directory C:\Users\...\Temp\RtmpGQF4gr/naio_10_cp1700.rds.

The input_coefficient_matrix_create() creates the input coefficient matrix, which is used for most of the analytical functions.

a_i**j: X_i**j / x_j

It checks the correct ordering of columns, and furthermore it fills up 0 values with 0.000001 to avoid division with zero.

input_coeff_matrix_sk <- input_coefficient_matrix_create(
data_table: sk_io
)
## Columns and rows of real_estate_imputed_a, extraterriorial_organizations are all zeros and will be removed.

Then you can create the Leontieff-inverse, which contains all the structural information about the relationships of 64x64 sectors of the chosen country, in this case, Slovakia, ready for the main equations of input-output economics.

I_sk <- leontieff_inverse_create(input_coeff_matrix_sk)

And take out the primary inputs:

primary_inputs_sk <- coefficient_matrix_create(
data_table: sk_io,
total: 'output',
return: 'primary_inputs')
## Columns and rows of real_estate_imputed_a, extraterriorial_organizations are all zeros and will be removed.

Now let’s see if there the government tries to stimulate the economy in three sectors, agricultulre, car manufacturing, and R&D with a billion euros. Direct effects measure the initial, direct impact of the change in demand and supply for a product. When production goes up, it will create demand in all supply industries (backward linkages) and create opportunities in the industries that use the product themselves (forward linkages.)

direct_effects_create( primary_inputs_sk, I_sk ) %>%
select ( all_of(c("iotables_row", "agriculture",
"motor_vechicles", "research_development"))) %>%
filter (.data$iotables_row %in% c("gva_effect", "wages_salaries_effect",
"imports_effect", "output_effect"))
## iotables_row agriculture motor_vechicles research_development
## 1 imports_effect 1.3684350 2.3028203 0.9764921
## 2 wages_salaries_effect 0.2713804 0.3183523 0.3828014
## 3 gva_effect 0.9669621 0.9790771 0.9669467
## 4 output_effect 2.2876287 3.9840251 2.2579634

Car manufacturing requires much imported components, so each extra demand will create a large importing activity. The R&D will create a the most local wages (and supports most jobs) because research is job-intensive. As we can see, the effect on imports, wages, gross value added (which will end up in the GDP) and output changes are very different in these three sectors.

This is not the total effect, because some of the increased production will translate into income, which in turn will be used to create further demand in all parts of the domestic economy. The total effect is characterized by multipliers.

Then solve for the multipliers:

multipliers_sk <- input_multipliers_create(
primary_inputs_sk %>%
filter (.data$iotables_row == "gva"), I_sk )

And select a few industries:

set.seed(12)
multipliers_sk %>%
tidyr::pivot_longer ( -all_of("iotables_row"),
names_to: "industry",
values_to: "GVA_multiplier") %>%
select (-all_of("iotables_row")) %>%
arrange( -.data$GVA_multiplier) %>%
dplyr::sample_n(8)
## # A tibble: 8 x 2
## industry GVA_multiplier
## <chr> <dbl>
## 1 motor_vechicles 7.81
## 2 wood_products 2.27
## 3 mineral_products 2.83
## 4 human_health 1.53
## 5 post_courier 2.23
## 6 sewage 1.82
## 7 basic_metals 4.16
## 8 real_estate_services_b 1.48

Vignettes

The Germany 1990 provides an introduction of input-output economics and re-creates the examples of the Eurostat Manual of Supply, Use and Input-Output Tables, by Jörg Beutel (Eurostat Manual).

The United Kingdom Input-Output Analytical Tables Daniel Antal, based on the work edited by Richard Wild is a use case on how to correctly import data from outside Eurostat (i.e. not with eurostat::get_eurostat()) and join it properly to a SIOT. We also used this example to create unit tests of our functions from a published, official government statistical release.

Finally, Working With Eurostat Data is a detailed use case of working with all the current functionalities of the package by comparing two economies, Czechia and Slovakia and guides you through a lot more examples than this short blogpost.

Our package was originally developed to calculate GVA and employment effects for the Slovak music industry (see our Slovak Music Industry Report), and similar calculations for the Hungarian film tax shelter. We can now programatically create reproducible multipliers for all European economies in the Digital Music Observatory, and create further indicators for economic policy making in the Economy Data Observatory.

Environmental Impact Analysis

Our package allows the calculation of various economic policy scenarios, such as changing the VAT on meat or effects of re-opening music festivals on aggregate demand, GDP, tax revenues, or employment. But what about the C**O₂, methane and other greenhouse gas effects of the reopening festivals, or the increasing meat prices?

Technically our package can already calculate such effects, but to do so, you have to carefully match further statistical vocabulary items used by the European Environmental Agency about air pollutants and greenhouse gases.

The last released version of iotables is Importing and Manipulating Symmetric Input-Output Tables (Version 0.4.4). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4897472, but we are alread working on a new major release. In that release, we are planning to build in the necessary vocabulary into the metadata functions to increase the functionality of the package, and create new indicators for our Green Deal Data Observatory. This experimental data observatory is creating new, high quality statistical indicators from open governmental and open science data sources that has not seen the daylight yet.

rOpenGov and the EU Datathon Challenges

rOpenGov, Reprex, and other open collaboration partners teamed up to build on our expertise of open source statistical software development further: we want to create a technologically and financially feasible data-as-service to put our reproducible research products into wider user for the business analyst, scientific researcher and evidence-based policy design communities.

rOpenGov is a community of open governmental data and statistics developers with many packages that make programmatic access and work with open data possible in the R language. Reprex is a Dutch-startup that teamed up with rOpenGov and other open collaboration partners to create a technologically and financially feasible service to exploit reproducible research products for the wider business, scientific and evidence-based policy design community. Open data is a legal concept - it means that you have the rigth to reuse the data, but often the reuse requires significant programming and statistical know-how. We entered into the annual EU Datathon competition in all three challenges with our applications to not only provide open-source software, but daily updated, validated, documented, high-quality statistical indicators as open data in an open database. Our iotables package is one of our many open-source building blocks to make open data more accessible to all.

Join our open collaboration Digital Music Observatory team as a data curator, developer or business developer. More interested in environmental impact analysis? Try our Green Deal Data Observatory team! Or economic policies, particularly computation antitrust, innovation and small enterprises? Check out our Economy Music Observatory team!

Recommendation Systems: What can Go Wrong with the Algorithm?

Thu, 06 May 2021 07:10:00 +0000

Traitors in a war used to be executed by firing squad, and it was a psychologically burdensome task for soldiers to have to shoot former comrades. When a 10-marksman squad fired 8 blank and 2 live ammunition, the traitor would be 100% dead, and the soldiers firing would walk away with a semblance of consolation in the fact they had an 80% chance of not having been the one that killed a former comrade. This is a textbook example of assigning responsibility and blame in systems. AI-driven systems such as the YouTube or Spotify recommendation systems, the shelf organization of Amazon books, or the workings of a stock photo agency come together through complex processes, and when they produce undesirable results, or, on the contrary, they improve life, it is difficult to assign blame or credit.

This is the edited text of my presentation on Copyright Data Improvement in the EU – Towards Better Visibility of European Content and Broader Licensing Opportunities in the Light of New Technologies - download the entire webinar’s agenda.

Assigning and avoding blame.

If you do not see enough women on streaming charts, or if you think that the percentage of European films on your favorite streaming provider—or Slovak music on your music streaming service—is too low, you have to be able to distribute the blame in more precise terms than just saying “it’s the system” that is stacked up against women, small countries, or other groups. We need to be able to point the blame more precisely in order to effect change through economic incentives or legal constraints.

This is precisely the type of work we are doing with the continued support of the Slovak national rightsholder organizations, as well as in our research in the United Kingdom. We try to understand why classical musicians are paid less, or why 15% of Slovak, Estonian, Dutch, and Hungarian artists never appear on anybody’s personalized recommendations. We need to understand how various AI-driven systems operate, and one approach would at the very least model and assign blame for undesirable outcomes in probabilistic terms. The problem is usually not that an algorithm is nasty and malicious; Algorithms are often trained through “machine learning” techniques, and often, machines “learn” from biased, faulty, or low-quality information.

Outcomes: What Can Go Wrong With a Recommendation System?

In complex systems there are hardly ever singular causes that explain undesired outcomes; in the case of algorithmic bias in music streaming, there is no single bullet that eliminates women from charts or makes Slovak or Estonian language content less valuable than that in English. Some apparent causes may in fact be “blank cartridges,” and the real fire might come from unexpected directions. Systematic, robust approaches are needed in order to understand what it is that may be working against female or non-cisgender artists, long-tail works, or small-country repertoires.

Some examples of “undesirable outcomes” in recommendation engines might include:

Recommending too small a proportion of female or small country artists; or recommending artists that promote hate and violence.
Placing Slovak books on lower shelves.
Making the works of major labels easier to find than those of independent labels.
Placing a lower number of European works on your favorite video or music streaming platform’s start window than local television or radio regulations would require.
Filling up your social media newsfeed with fake news about covid-19 spread by some malevolent agents.

These undesirable outcomes are sometimes illegal as they may go against non-discrimination or competition law. (See our ideas on what can go wrong – Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?) They may undermine national or EU-level cultural policy goals, media regulation, child protection rules, and fundamental rights protection against discrimination without basis. They may make Slovak artists earn significantly less than American artists.

Metadata problems: no single bullet theory

In our work in Slovakia, we reverse engineered some of these undesirable outcomes. Popular video and music streaming recommendation systems have at least three major components based on machine learning:

The users’ history – Is it that users’ history is sexist, or perhaps the training metadata database is skewed against women?
The works’ characteristics – are Dvorak’s works as well documented for the algorithm as Taylor Swift’s or Drake’s?
Independent information from the internet – Does the internet write less about women artists?

In the making of a recommendation or an autonomous playlist, these sources of information can be seen as “metadata” concerning a copyright-protected work (as well as its right-protected recorded fixation.) More often than not, we are not facing a malicious algorithm when we see undesirable system outcomes. The usual problem is that the algorithm is learning from data that is historically biased against women or biased for British and American artists, or that it is only able to find data in English language film and music reviews. Metadata plays an incredibly important role in supporting or undermining general music education, media policy, copyright policy, or competition rules. If a video or music steaming platform’s algorithm is unaware of the music that music educators find suitable for Slovak or Estonian teenagers, then it will not recommend that music to your child.

Furthermore, metadata is very costly. In the case of cultural heritage, European states and the EU itself have been traditionally investing in metadata with each technological innovation. For Dvorak’s or Beethoven’s works, various library descriptions were made in the analogue world, then work and recording identifiers were assigned to CDs and mp3s, and eventually we must describe them again in a way intelligible for contemporary autonomous systems. In the case of classical music and literature, early cinema, or reproductions of artworks, we have public funding schemes for this work. But this seems not to be enough. In the current economy of streaming, the increasingly low income generated by most European works is insufficient to even cover the cost of proper documentation, which then sends that part of the European repertoire into a self-fulfilling oblivion: the algorithm cannot “learn” its properties and it never shows these works to users and audiences.

Until now, in most cases, it was assumed that it is the artists or their representative’s duty to provide high quality metadata, but in the analogue era, or in the era of individual digital copies, we did not anticipate that the sales value will not even cover the documentation cost. We must find technical solutions with interoperability and new economic incentives to create proper metadata for Europe’s cultural products. With that, we can cover one area out of the three possible problem terrains.

But this is not enough. We need to address the question of how new, better Algorithms can learn from user history and avoid amplifying pre-existing bias against women or hateful speech. We need to make sure that when Algorithms are “scraping” the internet, they do so in an accountable way that does not make small language repertoires vulnerable.

Incentives and investments into metadata

In our paper we argue for new regulatory considerations to create a better, and more accountable playing field for deploying Algorithms in a quasi-autonomous system, and we suggest further research to align economic incentives with the creation of higher quality and less biased metadata. The need for further research on how these large systems affect various fundamental rights, consumer or competition rights, or cultural and media policy goals cannot be overstated. The first step is to open and understand these autonomous systems. It is not enough to say that the firing squads of Big Tech are shooting women out from charts, ethnic minority artists from screens, and small language authors from the virtual bookshelves. We must put a lot more effort on researching the sources of the problems that make machine learning Algorithms behave in a way that is not compatible with our European values or regulations.

This blogpost was first published on our general interest blog Data & Lyrics

Reprex Open Data Day 2021

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 15:30:00 +0200

Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business, and civil society. Reprex is a start-up that utilizes open data with open-source reproducible research: please challenge us with your data requests and participate in our web events.

The Reprex Open Data Day 2021 will be two informal conversations based on a series of run up introductory blogposts centered around two themes. Because important guests became ill in the last days, we are going to consolidate the two talks into one with less structure. We want to create an informal, inclusive, collaborative online event on International Open Data Day 2021. Please, grab a tea, coffee, or even a beer, and join us for an informal conversation. We hope that we will finish the afternoon with ideas on new, open-data driven collaborations.

9.30 EST / 15.30 CET: Open collaboration in business, policy and science. Creating evidence-based policy, business strategy or scientific research with small contributions with independent components with incentives. Short introduction with examples: joining environmental sensory data and public opinion data on maps; creating harmonized datasets across the Arab world. Survey harmonization, mapping, data products. Scaling up open collaboration: making small organizations competitive with big tech in the big data era. Data sharing, data pooling, data altruism and observatories. The new European trustworthy AI and data governance agenda.

You can click through a short presentation to familiarize yourself with our topics.

See you here.

Case studies:

We are connecting raw survey data about Climate Awareness in Eurobarometer surveys. Here is the reproduction code (intermediate to advanced R needed.) You should use the development version of our retroharmonize package at github.com/antaldaniel/retroharmonize
We are tracking changes in the boundaries of provinces, states, counties, parishes with our regions open source software – reproduction code here. You will need our regions package which is available on CRAN or in the rOpenGov GitHub repo.
We will talk about how to join this with air pollution data and put it on the map with Milos Popovic, who prepared this nice choropleth animation.

We will discuss data observatories (permanent data collection programs), open collaboration (open-source inspired way of cooperation among small and large independent actors) and data altruism.

Any questions: send Daniel a message on Keybase, Whatsapp or email.

Our Music Observatory in the Jump European Music Market Accelerator: Meet the 2021 Fellows and their Tutors

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 15:00:00 +0200

According to the announcement of JUMP, the European Music Market Accelerator, after a careful screening of all applications received, the selection committee composed of all JUMP board members has selected the most promising ideas and projects to be developed together with renowned tutors for this 2021 fellowship.

For nine months, the 20 fellows living in many European countries will develop their innovative projects, while receiving a comprehensive 360° training. In addition to specialised workshops by highly qualified experts, each fellow will receive one-on-one tutoring sessions from the most renowned music professionals coming from all over Europe.

The 20 selected projects cover a great variety of urgent needs faced within the music sector. They will:

help fostering social change with projects focusing on diversity in the industry, more fairness and transparency as well as raising awareness on timely issues.
enhance technological development with projects using blockchain, immersive sound and VR and AR.
build bridges between different key actors of the ecosystem.

Download the entire JUMP press release.

Reprex’s project, the automated Demo Music Observatory will be represented by Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex among other building bridges projects. This project offers a different approach to the planned European Music Observatory based on the principles of open collaboration, which allows contributions from small organizations and even individuals, and which provides higher levels of quality in terms of auditability, timeliness, transparency and general ease of use. Our open collaboration approach allows to power trustworthy, ethical AI systems like our Listen Local that we started out from Slovakia with the support of the Slovak Arts Council.

JUMP fellows building bridges between different key actors of the ecosystem.

Apart from our Demo Music Observatory the build bridges section Groovly with Martin Zenzerovich, From Play To Rec by Jeremy Dunne, Hajde Radio by Thibaut Boudaud, LowDee by Alex Davidson and ONO-HU! by Gina Akers.

Meet all the JUMP 2021 Fellows, including the technology and social change professionals!

Reprex is a start-up company based in the Netherlands and the United States that validated its early products in the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Lab in the Hague. In 2021 we joined the Dutch AI Coalition – NL AIC and requested membership in the European AI Alliance. Reprex is committed to applying reproducible in an open collaboration with our business, scientific, policy and civil society partners, and facilitate the use of open data and open-source software. Many fellows in the program are connected to other regions, like North America and Australia – because music is one of the most globalized industries and forms of art in the world! Reprex is a startup based in the Netherlands and the United States, and we are very excited to collaborate with our peers in new European territories, and in Canada and Australia.

Hope to meet you in these great events - maybe not only online!

Further links:

From Play to Rec on Facebook
HAJDE FR/EN

Follow up:

Jumping Ahead With the Digital Music Observatory (2021.11.13.)

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.

Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:23:00 +0200

Our article, Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field? is published in the February 2021 issue of CPI Antitrust Chronicle, which is fully devoted to competition policy issues in the music industry.

The dramatic growth of music streaming over recent years is potentially very positive. Streaming provides consumers with low cost, easy access to a wide range of music, while it provides music creators with low cost, easy access to a potentially wide audience. But many creators are unhappy about the major streaming platforms. They consider that they act in an unfair way, create an unlevel playing field and threaten long-term creativity in the music industry.

Our paper describes and assesses the basis for one element of these concerns, competition between recordings on streaming platforms. We argue that fair competition is restricted by the nature of the remuneration arrangements between creators and the streaming platforms, the role of playlists, and the strong negotiating power of the major labels. It concludes that urgent consideration should be given to a user-centric payment system, as well as greater transparency of the factors underpinning playlist creation and of negotiated agreements.

You can read the entire issue and the full text of our article on Competition Policy International in pdf.

Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

You can read the entire issue and the full text of our article on Competition Policy International in pdf.

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex Was Selected into the 2021 Fellowship Program of the European Music Market Accelerator

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 21:23:00 +0200

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex, was selected into 2021 Fellowship program of JUMP, the European Music Market Accelerator. Jump provides a framework for music professionals to develop innovative business models, encouraging the music sector to work on a transnational level. The European Music Market Accelerator composed of MaMA Festival and Convention, UnConvention, MIL, Athens Music Week, Nouvelle Prague and Linecheck support him in the development of our two, interrelated projects over the next nine months.

Our Demo Music Observatory is a demo version of the European Music Observatory based on open data, open source, automated research in open collaboration with music stakeholders. We hope that we can further develop our business model and find new users, and help the recovery of the festival and live music segment.
Listen Local is our AI system that validated third party music AI, such as Spotify’s or YouTube’s recommendation systems, and provides trustworthy, accountable, transparent alternatives for the European music industry. We hope to expand our pilot project from Slovakia to several European countries in 2021.

Reprex is committed to applying reproducible in an open collaboration with our business, scientific, policy and civil society partners, and facilitate the use of open data and open-source software.

Reprex Joins The Dutch AI Coalition

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 17:10:00 +0200

Reprex, our start-up, is based in the Netherlands and the United States that validated its early products in the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Lab in the Hague. In 2021, we decided to join the Dutch AI Coalition – NL AIC.

The NL AIC is a public-private partnership in which the government, the business sector, educational and research institutions, as well as civil society organisations collaborate to accelerate and connect AI developments and initiatives. The ambition is to position the Netherlands at the forefront of knowledge and application of AI for prosperity and well-being. We are continually doing so with due observance of both the Dutch and European standards and values. The NL AIC functions as the catalyst for AI applications in our country.

We are particularly looking forward to participating in the Culture working group of NLAIC, but we will also take a look at the Security, Peace and Justice and the Energy and Sustainability working groups. Reprex is committed to use and further develop AI solutions that fulfil the requirements of trustworthy AI, a human-centric, ethical, and accountable use of artificial intelligence. We are committed to develop our data platforms, or automated data observatories, and our Listen Local system in this manner. Furthermore, we are involved in various scientific collaborations that are researching ideas on future regulation of copyright and fair competition with respect to AI algorithms.

We are committed to applying reproducible in an open collaboration with our business, scientific, policy and civil society partners, and facilitate the use of open data and open-source software.

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 18:10:00 +0200

The majority of music sales in the world is driven by AI-algorithm powered robots that create personalized playlists, recommendations and help programming radio music streams or festival lineups. It is critically important that an artist’s work is documented, described in a way that the algorithm can work with it.

In our research paper – soon to be published – made for the Listen Local Initiative we found that 15% of Dutch, Estonian, Hungarian, or Slovak artists had no chance to be recommended, and they usually end up on Forgetify, an app that lists never-played songs of Spotify. In another project with rights management organizations, we found that about half of the rightsholders are at risk of not getting all their royalties from the platforms because of poor documentation.

But how come that distributors give streaming platforms songs that are not properly documented? What sort of information is missing for the European repertoire’s visibility? Reprex is exploring this problem in a practical cooperation with SOZA, the Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society, and in an academic cooperation that involves leading researchers in the field. A manuscript co-authored Martin Senftleben, director of the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam, and eminent researchers in copyright law and music economics, Reprex’s co-founder makes the case that Europe must invest public money to resolve this problem, because in the current scenario, the documentation costs of a song exceed the expected income from streaming platforms.

In the European Strategy for Data, the European Commission highlighted the EU’s ambition to acquire a leading role in the data economy. At the same time, the Commission conceded that the EU would have to increase its pools of quality data available for use and re-use. In the creative industries, this need for enhanced data quality and interoperability is particularly strong. Without data improvement, unprecedented opportunities for monetising the wide variety of EU creative and making this content available for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence training systems, will most probably be lost. The problem has a worldwide dimension. While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives. Download the manuscript from SSRN

Our Slovak Demo Music Database project is a best example for this. We started systematically collect publicly available information from Slovak artists (in our write-in process) and ask them to give GDPR-protected further data (in our opt-in process) to create a comprehensive database that can help recommendation engines as well as market-targeting or educational AI apps.

We believe that one of the problems of current AI algorithms that they solely or almost only work with English language documentation, putting other, particularly small language repertoires at risk of being buried below well-documented music mainly arriving from the United States.

We are looking for rightsholders and their organizations, artists, researchers to work with us to find out how we can increase the visibility of European music.

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This article, published in JIPITEC in 2022, remains one of our most cited works on copyright, metadata, and cultural policy.

The paper shows how fragmented copyright metadata undermines the visibility of European creative works, causes royalty losses for artists, and limits the ability of European industries to compete globally in emerging areas like AI training and recommender systems.

Using the music industry as a central case study, the article highlights why improved metadata and licensing infrastructures are vital. Its findings directly connect to our current projects on trustworthy AI, cultural data spaces, and fair remuneration systems.

📄 Read the published version in JIPITEC: Full text PDF
📄 Preprint version available on SSRN: SSRN abstract

Reprex introduction in IVIR, Amsterdam, NL

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 10:10:00 +0000

IViRtual 9 April 2021

Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 11:00:00 +0000

Download the study in Slovak or in English.

In 2015, realizing the low visibility and income-generating potential of Slovak music, the legislation introduced an amendment to the broadcasting act to regulate local content in radiostreams. The Slovak content promoting policy was well-intended but not based on any impact assessment, and it reached its goal only partially.

The Slovak broadcasting quotas in comparison with other national quotas a very simple, and they are impossible to measure, which makes both compliance and enforcement very difficult. Radio editors do not get any help to find music that fits into the playlists and fulfil the quota obligations – in many cases, it is impossible for them to find out if a song actually meets the quota requirements. For the same reason, neither is enforcement possible.

Another deficiency of the broadcasting quotas is that because of its fuzzy target, it is not clear whom it tries to help, and it has few friends. It is unclear how performers, composers or Slovak music producers can benefit from the system. Furthermore, it only helps a few genres, and it decreases the chances of other Slovak music in instrumental and non-Slovak language genres (for example, classical, jazz, rock) to be heard.

And at last, radio is losing its importance in music discovery. New generation find the music during their music discovery age on YouTube and digital streaming platforms. A Slovak content promoting policy that does not work on digital streaming platforms will be obsolete when radio content providers will switch to digital streaming in the foreseeable future.

Our Feasibility Study follows the following logic: In the first chapter we introduce various music recommendation systems in the context of local content promotion polices, like local mandatory content quota regulations.

In the second chapter, we consider the market-based or creative industry economy supporting policy goals, measurements, and potential support given to artists and producers.

We then turn in the third chapter to content-based local regulations promoting the use of the Slovak language or Slovak music content, irrespective of the performers and producers nationality, residence or ethnicity.

We introduce the idea of the Slovak Music Database, a comprehensive, mainly opt-in, opt-out database that of Slovak artists and Slovak music that should be supported by the local content regulation and other policies. We also create a Demo Slovak Music Database to understand the problem and scope of the creation of the comprehensive version.

The project website contains the Demo Slovak Music Database.

We also created a Demo Recommendation System. We explain here why.

Research questions

Why are the total market shares of Slovak music relatively low both on the domestic and the foreign markets?
How can we measure the market share of the Slovak music in the domestic and foreign markets?
How can we measure the value gap between what some media platforms, most particularly the biggest YouTube, does not pay out to the Slovak stakeholders within Slovakia?
What is the interplay of the various definitions on market share and national quota targets?
How ‘shadow-markets’ of home copying and unlicensed media platforms, such as YouTube impact market shares directly and national quotas indirectly?
How can modern data science, predictive microeconomics and statistics help increase the market share of Slovak music in Slovakia and abroad?

Thanks for the entire Reprex team who contributed to the English version:

Dr. Emily H. Clarke, musicology
Stef Koenis, musicologist, musician
Dr. Andrés Garcia Molina, data scientist, musicologist, editor
Kátya Nagy, music journalist, research assistant;

and the Slovak version:

Dominika Semaňáková, musicologist, editor
Dáša Bulíková, musician, translator.

Demo Slovak Music Database

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:10:00 +0200

We are finalizing our first local recommendation system, Listen Local Slovakia, and the accompanying Demo Slovak Music Database. Our aim is

Show how the Slovak repertoire is seen by media and streaming platforms
What are the possibilities to give greater visibility to the Slovak repertoire in radio and streaming platforms
What are the specific problems why certain artists and music is almost invisible.

In the next year, we would like to create a modern, comprehensive national music database that serves music promotion in radio, streaming, live music within Slovakia and abroad.

To train our locally relevant, alternative recommendation system, we filled the Demo Slovak Music Database from two sources. In the opt-in process we asked artists to participate in Listen Local, and we selected those artists who opted in from Slovakia, or whose language is Slovak. In the write-in process we collected publicly available data from other artists that our musicology team considered to be Slovak, mainly on the basis of their language use, residence, and other public biographical information. The following artists form the basis of our experiment. (If you want to be excluded from the write-in list, write to us, or you want to be included, please, fill out this form.)

Click here to view the table on a separate page

Modern recommendation systems usually rely on data provided by artists or their representatives, data on who and how is listening to their music, and what music is listened to by the audience of the artists, and certain musicological features of the music. Usually they collect data from various data sources, but these data sources are mainly English language sources.

The problem with these recommendation systems is that they do not help music discovery, and make starting new acts very difficult. Recommendation systems tend to help already established artists, and artists whose work is well described in the English language.

Our alternative recommendation system is a utility-based system that gives a user-defined priority to artists released in Slovakia, or artists identified as Slovak, or both. The system can be extended for lyrics language priorities, too. Currently, our app is demonstration to provide a more comprehensive database-driven tool that can support various music discovery, recommendation or music export tools. Our Feasibility Study to build such tools and our Demo App is currently under consultation with Slovak stakeholders.

Listen Local is developing transparent algorithms and open source solutions to find new audiences for independent music. We want to correct the injustice and inherent bias of market leading big data algorithms. If you want your music and audience to be analysed in Listen Local, fill this form in. We will include you in our demo application for local music recommendations and our analysis to be revealed in December.

Listen Local: Why We Need Alternative Recommendation Systems

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 17:10:00 +0200

The first version of our demo application

Recommendation systems utilize knowledge about music content and their audiences while also pursuing the objectives or needs of recommenders.

The simplest recommendation systems just follow the charts: for example, they select from well-known current or perennial greatest hits. Such a system may work well for an amateur DJ in a home party or a small local radio that just wants to make sure that the music in its programme will be liked by many people. They reinforce existing trends and make already popular songs and their creators even more popular.

If the recommendation engine is supported by big data and a machine learning system – or increasingly, a combination of several machine learning algorithms – the general modus operandi is to exploit information about both content and users in order to achieve certain goals.

How algorithmic recommendation systems work?

How recommendation systems work?

Spotify’s recommendation system is a mix of content- and collaborative filtering that exploits information about users’ past behaviour (e.g. liked, skipped, and re-listened songs), the behaviour of similar users, as well as data collected from the users’ social media and other online activities, or from blogs. Deezer uses a similar system that is boosted by the acquisition of Last.fm – big data created from user comments are used to understand the mood of the songs, for example.

Spotify makes 16 billion music recommendations each month in 2020.

YouTube, which plays an even larger role in music discovery, uses a system comprised of two neural networks: one for candidate generation and one for ranking. The candidate generation deep neural network provides works on the basis of collaborative filtering, while the ranking system is based on content-based filtering and a form of utility ranking that takes into consideration the user’s languages, for example.

What makes these systems common is that they maximize the algorithm creators’ corporate key performance indicators. Spotify wants to be ‘your playlist to life’ and increase the amount of music played during work or sports in the background, during travelling, or active music listening –- i.e. maximizing the number of hours spent using it, and do not let empty timeslots for other music providers, such as radio stations. YouTube and Netflix have similar targets. They are in many ways like commercial radio targets, which want to maximize the time spent listening to the broadcast stream. Radios and YouTube, in particular, have similar goals because they are mainly financed through advertising. For Spotify or Netflix, their key financial motivation is to avoid users’ cancelling their subscriptions or changing it to different providers, such as Amzon, Apple or Deezer.

What is the problem with black box recommendation systems?

What they also have in common is that they do not aim to give a fair chance to each uploaded song, serve equally every artist, or provide whatever equality of chances for English, Slovak or Farsi language content.

They tend to reinforce trends similarly to music charts, but with far bigger efficiency. As the Dutch comedian, author and journalist Arjen Lubach explains the YouTube algorithm, to keep their personal recommendations engaging all the day and all of the night, they create a comfortable universe for the user allows little distraction in. If the user wants to listen to global hit music, or stoner rock, it will never be distracted with anything else.

Zondag met Lubach on Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. Click settings sign to change the language of the captions.

The problem with such hyper-personalized media is that they leave no room for public activities. Public broadcasters, which had a monopoly to television broadcasting in most European countries until the early 1990s, for example, were aiming to air a diversity of news, knowledge and access to local culture. Many countries on all continents have maintained local content guidelines for broadcasting on public, commercial and community television and radio channels, for example, local music and films, and reliable news as a public service. Personalized media-, social media- and streaming platforms do not have such obligations.

Black box recommendation systems usually maximize a corporate key performance indicator, and they are not subject to usual public new service or local content regulations that traditional broadcast media is.
The goal and the steps that the algorithm is pursuing is not know to content creators, and they do not know when will the algorithm work for their benefit or against them.

Transparent and regulated AI

In our view, utility-based recommendation system can provide a bridge between current, corporate-owned systems that maximize a media or streaming platforms’ business indicators.

Public new service requirements or local content requirements (“national quotas”) set for commercial broadcasting are similar to utility or knowledge-based recommendation systems. A utility-based recommendation system, for example, would prefer from two candidates for a playlist the one that has a Slovak composer, or a performer from Wales, or which has Farsi lyrics.

Our Demo App creates recommendations on the basis of a pre-existing radio or personal streaming playlist that, by choice, contains a pre-defined ratio of music produced in Slovakia, or performed by Slovak artists. We will soon add Dutch and Hungarian choices to this demo, but naturally, we could add any city’s, regions’, province’s our countries preferences into the app.

Our Demo App and accompanying Feasibility Study in Slovakia shows how can a regulator create better broadcasting regulations, learning from the experience with AI-driven streaming platforms, and how can it apply the goals of local content requirements (such as a certain visibility for Slovak or a city-based music) and public service requirements (for example, spreading reliable information or stopping hateful music.)

Access for all

We do not believe that the current heated discussion on the re-regulation of AI and music streaming will solve all the problems of independent artists, bands from ethnic or racial minorities, or otherwise vulnerable producers. New regulation can limit the unintended collateral damage of big data algorithms deployed by big corporations, but they will not bring down the benefits of AI to these creators.

Take the example of the controversial new initiative that let’s artists, labels and publishers to promote their music in exchange for a cut in royalty rates. While felt by many artists injust and even corrupt, it is an answer to the growing need to influence how the recommendation algorithms are promoting certain music at the expense of tens of millions of sound recordings that are not recommended.

We believe that algorithms create value for the users, and if artists are not happy to pay for corporations to influence black box algoritms, thatn they must collaborate and share data, and build large enough data pools so that they can deploy white, transparent algorithms that work for them.

Our Feasibility Study shows why it is important that creators have a control over what data describes their music, their biographies and other information online, because corporate streaming platforms use this information for their algorithms.
We should that with relatively little effort creators can pool enough information to create alternative recommendation systems that follow a more agreeable goal, that is sensitive to local content requirements and more access to new artists, women or black performers, or which suppress hateful lyrics.
The benefit of an open algorithm and pooled data is that artists can actively look for audiences in various age groups or in cities that are accessible for them on a performing tour after the pandemic.

Overall, we want to show that regulating black box, private algorithms and data monopolies is only a first step to damage control. Deploying white, transparent algorithms and building collaborative or open data pools can only guarantee fairness in the digital platforms, in recommendations, and generally in the use of AI.

Reproducible research in practice: empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 08:10:00 +0200

PLOS One is the fourth most influential multidisciplinary journal after Nature, and Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (based on H index.) On December 3, 2020 it published a paper co-authored by Dr. Balazs Bodo, associate professor at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), Daniel Antal (Reprex, Demo Music Observatory), a data scientist interested in reproducible research, as an independent researcher, and Zoltan Puha, a Data Science PhD at Tilburg University, JADS. PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit Open Access publisher, empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

The article utilizes the our reproducible datasets created with our regions package, and builds on many years of expertise in empirical research on the field of music and audiovisual piracy, home copying and private copying compensation (see for example Private Copying in Croatia.) Our aim is to provide reliable, high quality indicators for the creative industries not only on national, but provincial, state, regional and metropolitan area level, too, because these levels are often more relevant for creators, performers and policy-makers.

The topic of the paper is Library Genesis (LG), the biggest piratical scholarly library on the internet, which provides copyright infringing access to more than 2.5 million scientific monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks. The paper uses advanced statistical methods to explain why researchers around the globe use copyright infringing knowledge resources. The analysis is based on a huge usage dataset from LG, as well as data from the World Bank, Eurostat, and Eurobarometer, to identify the role of macroeconomic factors, such as R&D and higher education spending, GDP, researcher density in scholarly copyright infringing activities.

We created a global and a far more detailed European model for pirate book downloads.

The main finding of the paper is that open access, even if it is radical, is not a panacea. The hypothesis of the research was that researchers in low-income regions use piratical open knowledge resources relatively more to compensate for the limitations of their legal access infrastructures. The authors found evidence to the contrary. Researchers in high income countries and European regions with access to high quality knowledge infrastructures, and high levels of funding use radical open access resources more intensively than researchers in lower income countries and regions, with less resourceful libraries. This means that while open knowledge is an important resource to close the knowledge gap between centrum and periphery, equality in access does not translate into equality in use. Structural knowledge inequalities are both present and are being reproduced in the context of open access resources.

The paper is unique not just because of the data it is based on. It also sets new standards in interdisciplinary legal research by publishing the paper, the data and the software code in the same time in open access repositories, following reproducible research best practices — the practices that we want to promote in our Demo Music Observatory (later renamed: Digital Music Observatory) and further data observatories to serve business, evidence-based policy and scientific research.

Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 11:00:00 +0000

We created a global and a far more detailed European model for pirate book downloads.

The paper is unique not just because of the data it is based on. It also sets new standards in interdisciplinary legal research by publishing the paper, the data and the software code in the same time in open access repositories, following reproducible research best practices — the practices that we want to promote in our Digital Music Observatory and further data observatories to serve business, evidence-based policy and scientific research.

Our research was funded from the Horizon Europe 2020 Research grant #710722 “OPENing UP new methods, indicators and tools for peer review, dissemination of research results, and impact measurement”.

Feasibility Study For The Establishment Of A European Music Observatory & The Demo Observatory

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 07:03:00 +0200

The Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory was published on 13 November. Our private observatory, CEEMID was consulted in the creation of the Feasibility Study, and some of our recommendations found way into the consultant’s document. We created a Demo Music Observatory to provide a practical guidance on the decisions facing the European stakeholders, and to answer the questions that were left open in the Feasibility Study — particularly on data integration and the institutional model, where a wrong choice can lead to very long delivery time, quality control and budgeting.

We have been developing our Demo Music Observatory in the world’s 2nd ranked university-backed incubator program, the Yes!Delft AI Validation Lab since 15 September 2020. Our aim is to show a better organizational model, examples of research automation and other data integration innovation that can reduce the budgetary needs of the European Music Observatory by 80-90% and provide far more timely, accurate, and relevant service than most data observatories in Europe.

CEEMID has been creating a similar data observatory to the foreseen European Data Observatory, solely based on the contribution of about 60 European stakeholders. As the Feasibility Study suggests, we would be happy to transfer much of CEEMID’s content to the European Data Observatory, which could potentially fill up about 50-70% of the envisioned observatory. We are building our Demo Music Observatory based on the 2000 pan-European indicators collected by CEEMID since 2014.

Challenge Our Demo Observatory: Check out the Music Diversity & Circulation Pillar of our Demo Music Observatory. If you do not find what you are looking for, contact us — we will try to put the data there from our repositories.

Illusory data gap: active and music participation is available on EU level both for gender groups or four ethnic minorities – this is regularly featured in various European CAP surveys and in our national CAP surveys, too.

The Feasibility Study is based on perceived data gaps between data needs of the European stakeholders and data availability. We have shown earlier this year to the European stakeholders that much of these data gaps are illusory. We would like to give about 50 indicators with full documentation, automated, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual refreshment for free for all music industry users. We would like to challenge the stakeholders to formulate data requests to us and think together on the ways how could the European music industry build a better observatory faster and with less cost.

Challenge Our Demo Observatory: Check out the Music Economy Pillar of our Demo Music Observatory. If you do not find what you are looking for, contact us — we will try to put the data there from our repositories.

The Feasibility Study concludes that a “European Music Observatory would require a very significant allocation of funds, beyond what could be currently expected from the possible budget of the future Creative Europe programme”. While the Feasibility Study provide cost options, or any cost-benefit analysis, we are certain that this is an exaggeration. Most European data observatories operate with an annual 20,000-200,000-euro subsidy. We want to show with our Demo Music Observatory what can be achieved with an annual budget of 20,000 euros, 50,000 euros, 100,000 euros or 200,000 euros.

Challenge Our Demo Observatory: Check out the Music, Society and Citizenship Pillar of our Demo Music Observatory. If you do not find what you are looking for, contact us — we will try to put the data there from our repositories.

Listen Local

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Listen Local Slovakia

Listen Local Slovakia was an experimental programme developed during the COVID-19 period to improve the visibility of local repertoire in an increasingly algorithm-driven music ecosystem. It addressed a structural imbalance: recommendation systems trained on global-scale data tend to reinforce existing popularity, making smaller-language and local artists systematically harder to discover.

The project aimed to create alternative pathways for music discovery through locally grounded playlists, radio programming, and data-driven promotion tools. Instead of relying on opaque platform algorithms, it explored transparent, reproducible methods for connecting artists with audiences, combining open data, playlist analysis, and collaborative curation.

My role was to transfer and adapt the Hungarian “Hallgass Hazait” concept to Slovakia, redesigning it for a different linguistic, institutional, and market environment. This involved aligning stakeholders across the Slovak music ecosystem and introducing an open policy analysis approach to ensure that methods, data, and assumptions remained transparent and reusable .

The project also served as an early prototype for later work on music data infrastructures. It demonstrated that discoverability is not only a cultural or editorial issue, but a data governance problem linked to metadata quality, identifier systems, and rights information — challenges that are widely recognised across European creative industries .

For me, Listen Local Slovakia marked the transition from advocacy for local music to building the data and policy tools required to support it sustainably.

“Big data creates injustice.” – Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction

Our Listen Local project is aiming to create better radio playlisting, personal playlisting and concert promotion in a local context: within Slovakia or at a more specific level, Flanders or even the city of Utrecht or Budapest. We aim to place our partner’s music in local radio lists, personal playlists, and grow their fan base during the COVID-19 pandemic so that in 2021 they can eventually meet in the venues again, and carry out longer, more successful tours than ever.

Signing up for artists, labels, talent managers below.

What is the problem?

Most people are listening to music on Spotify or Apple Music, and at home on YouTube. They are following advice from algorithms tested on hundreds of millions of people. Anybody can create playlists, but mainly Spotify, Apple, or YouTube create the playlists with their AI algorithms and their staff and their interests.

Listen Local: Open Collaboration Experiment & Feasibility Study - how you can participate in the experiment.
Forgetify: Popular Music That Nobody Listens To - because you do not want to end up on the list of 0 streams.
Who Is Not Recommended On Spotify - you need to have 1000x more followers to double the routes leading to your artist profile and recordings with the current algorithms. We need new recommendation engines to dig out the local artists buried under a pile of international hits.
The Racist Music Algorithm — big data algorithms will increase injustice and breach social norms if they are trained on improper data, or the algorithms are biased. This is why we are working on transparent, peer-reviewed, open source alternatives.
This Is Not Democracy - Robin Kester is one of the first artists who is looking for alternative recommendation routes towards the UK and Ireland.
The Mountains Are Higher Next Door And They Understand Our Lyrics - the Twentees are flying under the radar in Slovakia, Serbia, Romania, because they sing in a minority language.
October Playlist: Wounded Egos - a short case study of a playlist analysis and comparison.

If you are an artist, you can simply fill in a form identifying your music on Spotify, filling in a few biographical data about yourself (or your band, ensemble, group). If you represent several artists as a talent manager, music publisher, record label, granting agency or music export office, please get in touch with us for onboarding.

We are aiming to create an alternative market measurement, marketing and recommendation engine tool that is based on open source software, open collaboration, full scientific transparency in an open collaboration with artists, small businesses and the entire music ecosystem.

create new playlists Let’s build up a weekly, relevant, non-exclusive playlists for music coming from Utrecht, Antwerpen, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Flanders or the Netherlands that smoothly blend in local music with relevant, spiritually or musically matching songs that fans of the Utrecht, Antwerpen, Rotterdam, Den Haag bands like.
create apps! If Forgetify can pick out songs that nobody, ever, ever listened to on Spotify, not even the performer’s mother, sister, friends, not even their enemies, than we can must create new apps that allows fans in Utrecht, visitors or Rotterdam and the virtual community of Den Haag to find relevant music, and to connect with music created in these communities.

We are a bunch of musicians, musicologists, music analysts, music journalists, producers who want to make this happen.

Data Use

From participating artists we only ask questions that they usually post on their websites or would tell to music journalists or bloggers. We will put all this information (with some clearly stated exceptions in the registration form) on the website of the experiment.
We will use similar data used to analyze this playlist about the participants’ music. This data is an analysis of their released music, not about the persons who play the music, or their earnings.
We do not ask for any financial data, and we do not have access to any financial data of the participants.

Transparency

Listen Local and the Demo Music Observatory grew out of a large, collaborative project of collective management societies, grant managers, music distributors, venues, and other music stakeholders who joined forces to collect more royalties from 2014 onwards starting with three, and eventually encompassing more than a dozen countries.

The entire budget of our project is 10,000 euros, co-funded by the Slovak Arts Council, SOZA and Consolidated Independent, a distributor of independent music. We hope that this will be enough to create a demonstration and a detailed feasibility study that makes the user needs of Slovak managers, labels, publishers and artists themselves to continue this project in 2021. The project will be carried out by Reprex, a Dutch start-up co-founded by the author of the Slovak Music Industry Report, the first Hungarian Music Industry Report, Private Copying in Croatia, and the Central European Music Industry Report 2020.
Participation for artists and music venues is free in the experiment. In 2020, we would like to find a viable business model that keeps this tool a good value for money for anybody in the independent music scenes.
We are asking labels, publishers, talent managers to contribute to our experimental budget on a crowdsourcing basis at a later stage, if they will continue to use this service in 2021. Currently our experiment is free. Signing up for artists, labels, talent managers above.

Unlabel

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Unlabel is a concept and pilot developed within the Open Music Europe framework that explores how under-documented, culturally valuable music can be made visible, usable, and distributable in the digital ecosystem. It addresses a structural problem identified across European music systems: large volumes of repertoire remain “invisible” because rights, metadata, and attribution are incomplete or inconsistent .

The project builds on policy and technical work around interoperable copyright data and metadata governance, particularly the need for machine-readable, trustworthy identifiers and rights information across the lifecycle of musical works and recordings . Instead of attempting full reconstruction at source, Unlabel focuses on pragmatic repair and enrichment of legacy data, enabling works to re-enter circulation.

Developed in collaboration with the Swedish distributor Aloaded, Unlabel tests how improved metadata, identifier alignment, and lightweight rights modelling can unlock dormant catalogues for distribution platforms and AI-ready environments. It operates at the intersection of archives, collective management, and digital distribution.

For me, Unlabel represents a shift from analysis to implementation: a concrete attempt to demonstrate that better data governance is not only a policy objective, but a practical pathway to cultural reuse, market access, and long-term preservation.

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!

Reproducible Survey Harmonization: retroharmonize Is Released

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 11:31:39 +0000

Our original intention was to make surveying more accessible for music and creative industry partners, by relying more on already existing survey data, and better designing complementary, smaller surveys, becasue surveying, opinion polling is becoming increasingly expensive in the develop world. People are less and less likely to sit down for an interview in their houses. We have tried to harmonize our custom surveys, particuarly with Kantar in Hungary and Focus in Slovakia with exisiting EU projects. But we ended up making a part of international survey harmonization across countries and throughout years easier to automate.

Surveys are like sensors for natural sciences and industrial production. They are essential for almost any social and economic statistical indicator, for calculating the inflation, parts of the GDP, participation in education programs. Making surveys easier to harmonize and exploit more already existing survey data can bring down research cost, and can increase research value at the same time. (See our earlier blog post Increase The Value Of Market Research With Open Data And Survey Harmonization.)

So, if you are an R user, you can use install.packages(“retroharmonize”) to get the released 0.1.13 version and make tutorials with real Eurobarometer or Afrobarometer microdata. With devtools::install_github("antaldaniel/retroharmonize") you can already install the current development version 0.1.14, which handles perl-like regex, which will be necessary for our next tutorial in the making for Arab Barometer.

Related:

Launching Our Demo Music Observatory

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 08:00:39 +0000

Today, on 15 September 2020, we officially launched our minimal viable product as we promised to partners back in February. This was a particularly difficult period for everybody. We aspired to deliver by September in a very different environment, our hopes for commissioned work went up in flames with the pandemic, and our targeted users, musicians and music entrepreneurs, talent managers, music venues lost most of their income. The organizations helping them, granting authorities, export offices and collective management societies are overwhelmed with the problem. During these troublesome times, our team expanded, attracted great new talent, and kept working.

Our first product is the Demo Music Observatory, a collaborative, automated research-based observatory for the music industry, one that is particularly hard hit by the COVID19 crisis. Not only great artists, composers, technicians, managers fell victim to the virus, but musicians lost about 50–90% of their income from live music. This translates to a 100% loss for the live music technicians and managers.

See our earlier blogpost on what you see on the video.

The music industry was never a place for great job security. For putting up a show, you usually need a network of 10–200 artists, technicians and managers to work together as freelancers without all those social benefits that many people enjoy in other walks of life. We have been trying to figure out how to help this microenterprise and freelancer-network based industry with research for five years. Our aim is to make them competitive when they are talking with their buyers: Google, Apple, Spotify, who are really heavy-weight data and AI pros. Our better plan their tours, when they will be back on the road, to understand what sort of audiences and purchasing power waits for them in different European cities.

We are launching at a time when the music industry is crying for help.Therefore, we have decided to make our demo observatory open and unfinished. Over the last 7 years, we have built up about 2000 music and creative sector indicators to be used for business KPIs, forecasting targets, grant evaluations, royalty valuations, concert demography target group analysis and other professional uses. We would like to open up, based on your needs, about 50 well-designed indicators, and pledge to keep it daily refreshed, corrected, documented, citaable, downloadable. Also, feel free to use our most valuable source code—use it for your own purposes, even modify it, as long as you keep it open.

For our smaller partners, we follow what musicians do these days on Bandcamp: name your price. We make a pledge to our small partners: if you need reliable data to plan your next grant calls, calculate royalties, compensations, predict hit candidates, give us the job—and name your price. Post-corona, you can take for a dollar the best music from Bandcamp. You can take our research products, for a limited period, for any amount you name, as long as it is for a good cause and serves the industry, musicians, technicians or managers. In return, we ask for your feedback. Help us validate whether we are on the right track, tell us how we can cooperate after the pandemic, in better times.

Our larger and better funded partners? We ask you to pay the price we name, because we believe that it is a well-justified, fair and competitive price, set by pricing experts.

We appreciate it if you take a look at our offering, or if you pass this blogpost on to your colleagues in the industry. Our main target audience initially are music professional in broader Europe, but we are planning to cover all major global markets very soon, too. Feedback from the U.S., Australia, Canada, Colombia, Brazil & Argentina is particularly welcome as we have great plans over there!

Who we are?

We started our operations on 1 September 2020 on the basis of CEEMID, a pan-European data observatory that created about 2000 music and creative industry indicators for its users. In the coming days, we are gradually opening up about 50 music industry and 50 broader creative industry indicators in a fully reproducible workflow, with daily re-freshed, re-processed, well-formatted and documented indicators for business and policy decisions.

We would like to validate this approach in one of the world’s most prestigious university-backed incubator programs, in the Yes!Delft AI/Blockchain Validation Lab. We’re finalist on their selection, and all help before 23 September from our friends in the music industry is more than appreciated. If we get there, we can rely on probably the best pros in Europe to make our offering better tailored and financially sustainable.

Get in touch!

We use the very simple and extremely secure keybase.io, a kind of mix of Whatsapp, Skype, Google Drive, One Drive and zoom. You can get in touch on that platform with us in anytime here.

You can easily contact on LinkedIn Daniel or Kátya and of course, we have a usually working email contact form, too. Our email is name.surname at our main domain.

Video credits

Data acquisition and processing: Daniel Antal, CFA and Marta Kołczyńska, PhD (survey data).
Documentation automation: Sandor Budai
Video art: Line Matson
Music: Moon Moon Moon.

Creating An Automated Data Observatory

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:00:39 +0000

We are building data ecosystems, so called observatories, where scientific, business, policy and civic users can find factual information, data, evidence for their domain. Our open source, open data, open collaboration approach allows to connect various open and proprietary data sources, and our reproducible research workflows allow us to automate data collection, processing, publication, documentation and presentation.

Our scripts are checking data sources, such as Eurostat’s Eurobase, Spotify’s API and other music industry sources every day for new information, and process any data corrections or new disclosure, interpolate, backcast or forecast missing values, make currency translations and unit conversions. This is shown illustrated with an earlier post.

For direct access to the file visit this link.

In the video we show automated the creation of an observatory website with well-formatted, statistical data dissemination, a technical document in PDF and an ebook can be automated. In our view, our technology is particularly useful technology in business and scientific researech projects, where it is important that always the most timely and correct data is being analyzed, and remains automatically documented and cited. We are ready deploy public, collaborative, or private data observatories in short time.

Data processing costs can be as high as 80% for any in-house AI deployment project. We work mainly with organization that do not have in house data science team, and acquire their data anyway from outside the organization. In their case, this rate can be as high as 95%, meaning that getting and processing the data for deploying AI can be 20x more expensive than the AI solution itself.

AI solutions require a large amount of standardized, well processed data to learn from. We want to radically decrease the cost of data acquisition and processing for our users so that exploiting AI becomes in their reach. This is particularly important in one of our target industries, the music industries, where most of the global sales is algorithmic and AI-driven. Artists, bands, small labels, publishers, even small country national associations cannot remain competitive if they cannot participate in this technological revolution.

We would like to validate this approach in one of the world’s most prestigious university-backed incubator programs, in the Yes!Delft AI/Blockchain Validation Lab.

Video credits

Data acquisition and processing: Daniel Antal, CFA and Marta Kołczyńska, PhD (survey data).
Documentation automation: Sandor Budai
Video art: Line Matson
Music: Moon Moon Moon.

Starting-up

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 10:15:00 +0000

The big day has come: the co-founders singed off the documents at the public notary and started the registration of a reproducible research start-up in Leiden. We got a lot of support from our friends! Your encouragement gives us a lot of energy to accomplish our first milestones, and to get Reprex B.V. going!

Reprex means ‘reproducible example’ in data science. When you are stuck with a problem, creating a reproducible example allows other computer scientists, statisticians, programmers or data users to solve it. In 80% of the cases, you usually find the solution while creating a generalized example. In the 20% other cases, you can reach out for help easily.

In the coming days, we are launching demo versions of our headline products, data observatories. music.dataobservatory.eu will be a fully automated online service that every day collects, processes, cleans, and publishes scientifically valid data about European music. Very soon after we will launch two other observatories.

The creative and cultural sector, NGOs, most research institutions, data journalism teams are usually very small, and they do not have internal IT or data science capacities. We would like to provide them a transparent, high quality, and fully open source solution to acquire data, process it without errors, document it and make sense of it. We would like to embrace the idea of open collaboration among creative enterprises, scientific researchers, NGOs, data journalists and policymakers with our work.

Our work will comply with the Open Policy Analysis standards developed by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences & Center for Effective Global Action and the four principles of reproducible research: reviewability, replicability, confirmability and auditability. We believe that these standards apply in reproducible finance, empirical evidence presentation in courts, or advocating sound policies and producing high-quality journalism.

Do you want to help our start?

We would like to enter into the Validation Lab of one of the best artificial intelligence incubators in early September. Talented team members, letters of intents and assignments from organizations will give a lot of credibility to our start Meet our team ».

Put as in contact with people who love to write code in R and interested in automating business and social science research and primary data collection such as surveying. Check out what sort of code we create »
Introduce us to people who need data and information to make better informed decision and analysis in music, film, book publishing, photography services or socially responsible finance.
Share contacts of data journalists who would like to develop stories from big survey programs like Eurobarometer, Afrobarometer and Lationbarometro, or base their storytelling on data and its visualizations. See our survey harmonization examples »

Do you know such people? Send over this post or connect us in an email or social media message!

Thanks again for your good wishes and encouragements, and hope to hear from you soon!

Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:00:00 +0000

CEEMID & Consolidated Independent presented and discussed with stakeholders the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on national and comparative evidence-based policymaking in the cultural and creative sector on the CCS Ecosystems: FLIPPING THE ODDS Conference – a two-day high-level stakeholder event jointly organized by Geothe-Institute and the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission with the Creative FLIP project.

The CEE Report builds on the results of the first Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and Czech music industry reports are compared with Armenian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Slovenian data and findings.

Our research findings were earlier presented and discussed in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Bratislava with stakeholders.

You can find the earlier presentations in the blog section of the website.

Executive Summary

The first Central European Music Industry Report is the result of a co-operation that started among stakeholders in three EU countries five years ago to measure the economic value added of music – the basis of a modern royalty pricing system. This gave birth to CEEMID, originally the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Databases, a data integration programme that now in 2020, covers all of Europe. CEEMID fulfils similar roles to the planned European Music Observatory and supports all pillars of the future pan-European system.

The comparison of Western and Eastern music audiences reveals key demographic differences that make the unchanged adoption of business practices from mature markets in the region questionable. Chapter 2 of this report will show these differences and their consequences on music markets, in terms of visiting and acquisition likelihood, frequency, seasonality and purchasing capacity. This is an example of how CEEMID fulfils the role of Pillar 3 (music, society and citizenship) in the planned European Music Observatory.

Chapter 3 contrasts market demand with the supply strategies of musicians. CEEMID has been surveying music professionals, including artists, technicians and managers about their working conditions, market conditions and plans for five years across a growing number of countries. In 2019 we invited 100 national and regional stakeholders to distribute our surveys. In some countries, our surveys already have several years of historic data, making the resulting musician database probably the largest ever source of data about how music is produced and how musicians live. We are constantly looking for partners to roll out this survey to new countries in new languages.

The CEE region has comparative advantages in big music events like festivals, and it has become one of the most important hubs for cultural tourism in the world. We explain this phenomenon in Chapter 4 by showing the differences in demand composition, demography and supply of venues in the second chapter. The lack of a modern and dense network of permanent music venues gave rise to magnificent music festivals in the CEE. Open’er, Sziget and Exit are among the biggest and best festivals in the world, closely followed by several smaller festivals in all countries. The share of festivals in the live music market is many times higher than in Western Europe and they provide vital export revenues to the local music economies. However, they play a limited role in finding new audiences for local artists, as they are increasingly programming for Western audiences by providing shows of international hits. They can only very partially fill in the gaps left by the small venue problem that hit the emerging markets harder than the UK or Australia, where policy action had been already taken to reverse the decline of the availability of smaller live music venues.

On the recording side, our analysis shows that modern digital services are growing at a faster rate than in mature markets. Because of lower repertoire competition, streaming quantities are similar for a typical Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Slovak track than in the mature markets. However, revenue growth is limited because of the interplay of several analysed factors. Our analysis of the live and recorded music markets shows that CEEMID fulfils the roles of the Pillar 1 (music economy) of the planned European Music Observatory.

Most recorded music sales revenue in the region comes from streaming platforms, just like in the mature markets. Successful sales strategies require a solid knowledge of the global marketplace and the ability to understand and train sales algorithms. Micro-enterprises, such as independent labels, have very limited ability to cope with these functions, given that they do not have market research or R&D functions. CEEMID and Consolidated Independent have started initiating open, national R&D consortia to create the necessary concentration in data assets, analytical capacity and budgets to close this gap. As a first step, CEEMID and Consolidated Independent have created a large, independent music dataset based on hundreds of millions of royalty statement entries to create our market indexes, styled after stock market and bond market indexes. Streaming opportunities are fast changing as roll-out of streaming services is happening at a different rate in various territories; subscription charges and the exchange rate to the producer’s currency vary and repertoire competition emerges in the market. Our volume and revenue indexes in Chapter 5.3 are aimed at creating sales algorithms that optimize sales volumes and expected revenues. We believe that this analysis also reveals that CEEMID partially fulfils the roles of Pillar 2 (music diversity and circulation) and feeds important data into Pillar 4 (innovation).

The region has far bigger untapped potential than most music business executives believe. Households in the region spend a significantly lower share of their recreational budget on music than their Western, Southern or Nordic peers. The region has a lot of untapped cultural purchasing power because servicing is particularly challenging in both the live and recorded sides of the business.

This upside potential cannot be tapped without better pricing. Royalty levels are often very low in the region. Due to many combined effects analysed in this short report, the gap between royalties earned in the CEE and Western Europe is several times bigger than the difference in GDP or national average wage. These gaps are partly caused by special interests preventing collective management from charging appropriate tariffs for restaurants, media companies or electronic appliance importers and manufacturers, and partly by unfavourable taxation of cultural products and services.

CEEMID was designed to create economic evidence on royalty pricing, private copying compensation and the creation of economic value added in the industry. In the first Hungarian Music Industry Report of ProArt and in the first Slovak Music Industry Report we have shown that economic and taxation policies of the CEE countries aimed to support car and electronics manufacturing create a distorted, unfavourable economic regime for creative industries. We want to help local stakeholders with economic evidence to correct these discriminatory policies during the overhaul of the EU VAT system. We have been helping various national organizations with economic evidence, presented in the light of latest EU jurisprudence, to improve their pricing activities. Our thousands of indicators were also used in ex ante evaluations of granting schemes.

In 2020, all EU member states will change their copyright administration legislation because of the national implementations of the 2019/790 Digital Single Market directive. CEEMID provides evidence in several countries about the size and impact mechanism of the value transfer, and generally the widespread use of the copyright exemption for private copying. We believe that the thousands of pan-European music industry indicators that we have aggregated over the five years will play a vital role in these regulatory processes.

CEEMID fulfils its roles with a very thorough exploitation of the EU’s 17-years-old Open Data regime with the re-use of public sector information, and a very careful mapping of the music industry. These maps help us conduct annual surveys among musicians and the audience, and they help us connect (always with pre-approval and with a user mandate) to industry databases. We do not only cover the EU countries, but increasingly (potential) candidate countries and neighbourhood countries.

In our vision, this data collection and integration, i.e. Pillars 1-3 should be available for all music stakeholders, should remain public and publicly funded. The last Pillar of the observatory, innovation, is where private entities should compete. The founders of CEEMID and Consolidated Independent believe that this report demonstrates the business and policy benefits of such a system with the analysis of the Central & Eastern European music markets. We believe that this way CEEMID is in a position to serve most of the planned functions of the envisioned European Music Observatory, and we are looking for ways to make either our thousands of indicators, or our data collection and integration software open source and available for all stakeholders in the EU and its neighbours. CEEMID was born out of necessity to level out the different levels of public research and statistical coverage of the EU member states. In our view, private entities in the future should focus their investments in Pillar 4 of the planned observatory, i.e. competing in innovation with creating new models, algorithms and services based on data that is available throughout the European Union without giving further advantage to the already mature markets.

Slides

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Create slides in Markdown with Wowchemy

Wowchemy | Documentation

Features

Efficiently write slides in Markdown
3-in-1: Create, Present, and Publish your slides
Supports speaker notes
Mobile friendly slides

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

Code Highlighting

Inline code: variable

Code block:

porridge = "blueberry"
if porridge == "blueberry":
 print("Eating...")

Math

In-line math: $x + y = z$

Block math:

$$ f\left( x \right) = ;\frac{{2\left( {x + 4} \right)\left( {x - 4} \right)}}{{\left( {x + 4} \right)\left( {x + 1} \right)}} $$

Fragments

Make content appear incrementally

{{% fragment %}} One {{% /fragment %}}
{{% fragment %}} **Two** {{% /fragment %}}
{{% fragment %}} Three {{% /fragment %}}

Press Space to play!

One Two Three

A fragment can accept two optional parameters:

class: use a custom style (requires definition in custom CSS)
weight: sets the order in which a fragment appears

Speaker Notes

Add speaker notes to your presentation

{{% speaker_note %}}

- Only the speaker can read these notes
- Press `S` key to view
 {{% /speaker_note %}}

Press the S key to view the speaker notes!

Themes

black: Black background, white text, blue links (default)
white: White background, black text, blue links
league: Gray background, white text, blue links
beige: Beige background, dark text, brown links
sky: Blue background, thin dark text, blue links

night: Black background, thick white text, orange links
serif: Cappuccino background, gray text, brown links
simple: White background, black text, blue links
solarized: Cream-colored background, dark green text, blue links

Custom Slide

Customize the slide style and background

{{< slide background-image="/media/boards.jpg" >}}
{{< slide background-color="#0000FF" >}}
{{< slide class="my-style" >}}

Custom CSS Example

Let’s make headers navy colored.

Create assets/css/reveal_custom.css with:

.reveal section h1,
.reveal section h2,
.reveal section h3 {
 color: navy;
}

Questions?

Ask

Documentation

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

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

Tour

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

Wikimuseum

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

Antal Dániel honlapja

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Udmurt Történeti Fotógyűjtemény

Spaces of a Constructive Dialogue

Spaces of a Constructive Discourse

Főfotó

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

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

WikiMuseum

Key exhibitions & outcomes

Key insights / lessons

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

Who should attend?

Why attend?

Practical details

Green Paper on AI, Data Governance, and Metadata Policies for Europe’s Music Ecosystem (v0.1 Early Release)

About this Release

Participate

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

Press F on your keyboard

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

Remapping the Livonian Coast: A Multilingual Gazetteer of the Settlements of Northern Kurzeme

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

Open Music Registers

About this Release

Participate

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?

A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

SKCMDb

Press `F` on your keyboard