Publications | Antal Dániel honlapja

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.

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Important: This version is not for citation in academic or policy work.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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”.

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.

Publications | Antal Dániel honlapja

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

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

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

Open Music Registers

About this Release

Participate

A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei

Open Music Observatory Technical Report (Versioned)

About this Release

Next Steps

An Empirical Analysis of Music Streaming Revenues and Their Distribution

Related Work

Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?

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

Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad

Research questions

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

Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020

Executive Summary