Pink Floyd
in Venice

Our idea

In 1989, in occasion of one of Venice's most important festivals, the "Festa del Redentore", celebrated every year on the third Sunday of July, a young entrepeneur by the name of Fran Tomasi managed to book the second-to-last night of the Pink Floyd's European Tour for their new album - A Momentary Lapse Of Reason - in the UNESCO site of the Venetian Lagoon.

The idea was revolutionary; the band would play on a floating stage, creating a magical atmosphere but also a significant struggle for the historic city's administration.

The number of people attending the concert was huge: over 200 thousand people came to the Serenissima, making it one of the biggest musical events in Italian history. The concert was also broadcast all over the world, increasing the already incredible amount of people witnessing this piece of music history. The event came at a price, as the city council was blamed for the aftermath of the concert and forced to resign due to the public opinion’s increasing pressure.

We think this event is a key moment in our recent history, as it intertwines music with such an important historical site. This is why we created this Linked Open Data project: Pink Floyd in Venice LOD.

A poster for the concert

k

People attending

mln

Tv audience

songs

Setlist

Items

For our project we were asked to find ten items held by cultural institutions. These items had to somehow be linked to our main idea. We found many candidates, but only chose the following ten by trying to select items as different as possible in terms of purpose and provenance. After completing our project, we came back to them and thoroughly described them with our new defined schemas. Each item has a link under its card to its specific description, and the page with all metadata can be found here. These are our ten items:

Newspaper article

Article
Newspaper article on the concert's aftermath and the public's outrage at Venice's conditions.
Metadata
The Wall, Pink Floyd movie

Movie
The iconic movie "The Wall", directed by Alan Parker, portraying Pink Floyd's omonimous album's sounds in film in a highly metaphorical yet tangible way.
Metadata
Map of Venice

Map
A detailed map of the Venice area, with a view on the lagoon where the concert took place.
Metadata
Boardgame about Venice

Boardgame
A Venice-themed boardgame on the gloomy future of a future sunken city: players become art collectors looking for valuable treasures.
Metadata
Postcard of Venice

Postcard
A historical postcard, depicting the "Riva Schiavoni" waterfront on St. Mark's Basin as it was at the beginning of the XX Century.
Metadata
Painting of Venice

Painting (Picture of)

An astonishing painting, depicting Venice and its "ponte votivo" as the city is finalising the preparations for the "Redeemer's festival".
Metadata
Songbook for a momentary lapse of reason album

Songbook
The official songbook for the tour's omonimous album: A momentary lapse of reason.
Metadata
A momentary lapse of reason album

Album
"A momentary lapse of reason", the album whose tour brought the Pink Floyd to Venice for a truly historic event.
Metadata
Big Muff guitar pedal

Guitar pedal
A tangible piece of music history, the "Big Muff" pedal is a must: from Jimi Hendrix, to Santana, to the Pink Floyd, it has defined the sound of rock guitar.
Metadata
Book about Venice

Book
A book on the "floating concert" in Venice, detailing all controversies, between the strict sound system rules and the aftermath of the concert.
Metadata

E/R Model

What follows is our representation of the Entity-Relationship model of the event. The main focus of the model is the concert, placed at the centre of the map. This concept is linked to four main entities: Venice and its Lagoon, the Festa del Redentore, the tour for the album A Momentary Lapse of Reason and of course the band, Pink Floyd.
All chosen items are then linked to one or more entities. While building the model, we noticed there were two types of links, and we decided to distinguish between main and secondary links respectively with black and grey arrows.

Metadata Scouting

After creating our Entity-Relationship model we delved into our items to identify and categorise the different metadata standards used by the hosting institutions. We went back to the sources of our items and gathered information - where it was available - about the standards: after that we studied each schema definition to better understand their uses and differences. Here are the main models we encountered:

  1. Marc21 (Machine Readable Cataloging) is a standard format for bibliographic records that was developed by the Library of Congress (LoC). This standard is not very comprehensible by a human eye but is very precise.
  2. MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) was also developed by the Library of Congress and is a well-rounded, transversal standard that also mediates between the complexity of Marc21 and Dublin Core applications. This is an XML oriented standard.
  3. F-ICCD represents the rules developed by the ICCD (Istituto Centrale per la Catalogazione e la Documentazione) is a set of norms used to compile records about photography (F).
  4. MMD is a metadata standard developed by Musicbrainz to catalogue music related objects. This is an XML oriented standard, however it lacks features from other standards and represents the length of items in milliseconds, that is not very comprehensible by a human eye.
  5. CIDOC-CRM represents a wide-minded standard that aims at information integration in the different fields of cultural heritage. We decided to apply this to the postcard as it allows for a good integration with other standards.
  6. SOMA (Shared Online Media Archive) is a standard used to create a shared media archives, with the purpose of storing information of many different media. This standard also represents length of visual and musical media in milliseconds.

Metadata Alignment

In order to make data more interoperable, we grouped the different items in three categories: artefacts, textual resources and multimedia. We then analysed the different metadata used for each category from four points of view: Who, When, Where, What. In many cases the metadata used allows a sufficient interoperability between different standards referred to items with similar characteristics; in general, we chose to use Dublin Core (dc) as a reference, as it represents one of the most widely used standards.

Artefacts

  • Who

    Property DC/DCterms MODS MARC21 CIDOC CRM F-ICCD
    Creator dc:creator <name><namePart> 100/110 (Personal/Corporate Name)
    700 Added Entry    		 P94 has_creator
    > E39 Actor    		 AUT
    Contributor dc:contributor <name><namePart> 508 $a: Creation/production credits note P11_had_participant
    > E39_Actor    		 AUT
    Publisher dc:publisher <originInfo><publisher> 260 Publication, Distribution $b P14_carried_out_by
    > E39_Actor    		 PDFN-PDFR

  • When

    Property DC/DCterms MODS MARC21 CIDOC CRM F-ICCD
    Publication Date dcterms:created <originInfo><dateIssued> 260 Publication Distribution $c E12_Production
    >P4_has_time-span
    >E52_Time-Span    		 DT

  • Where

    Property DC/DCterms MODS MARC21 CIDOC CRM F-ICCD
    Production Location dc:coverage <geographic> 260 Publication Distribution $a P7_took_place_at
    > E53_place    		 LRC
    Current Location dc:coverage <physicalLocation> 852$a Location P53_has_current_location
    > E53_place    		 ROFC

  • What

    Property DC/DCterms MODS MARC21 CIDOC CRM F-ICCD
    Subject dc:subject <subject> <geographical>
    <temporal>    		 6XX Subject Access Entry P129_is_about ROFS
    Title dc:title <titleInfo><title> 2XX Title and title paragraph P102_has_title
    > E35_Title    		 ROFT
    Type dc:type <typeOfResource> <genre> 3XX Physical Description P2_has_type
    > E55_Type    		 OGTT
    Language dc:language <language><languageTerm> 546 Language Note P72_has_language
    > E56_Language    		 ISEL
    Material dc:format <physicalDescription>
    <form type="material">    		 340$a P2 has type
    > E57 Material    		 MTCM
    Dimensions dc:format <physicalDescription> 534$e P43 has dimension
    >E54 dimension    		 MIS

Textual data

  • Who

    Property DC/DCterms MARC21 EDM
    Author dc:creator 100/110 (Personal Name/Corporate Name)/700 Added Entry dc:creator
    Contributor dc:contributor 508 Creation/Production Credits Note $a: Creation/production credits note dc:contributor
    Publishing House dc: publisher 260 Publication Distribution $b

  • When

    Property DC/DCterms MARC21 EDM
    Publication Date dcterms:created 260 Publication Distribution $c dcterms:created

  • Where

    Property DC/DCterms MARC21 EDM
    Place of Publication dc:coverage 260 Publication Distribution $a edm:Place
    Current Location dc:rightsHolder 542$d Edm:currentHolder

  • What

    Property DC/DCterms MARC21 EDM
    Title dc:title 222 Key Title dc:title
    Language dc:language 041 Language Code edm:language
    Type dc:type Leader 06 edm:type
    Length dcterms:SizeorDuration 300 Physical Description dcterms:SizeorDuration
    Subject dc:subject 6XX Subject Access Entry dc:subject

Multimedia

  • Who

    Property DC/DCterms MMD SOMA
    Creator dc:creator <artist> Creator
    Contributor dc:contributor <artist> Contributor
    Publisher dc:publisher <label> Publisher
    Rights Holder dc:rightsHolder - Rights

  • When

    Property DC/DCterms MMD SOMA
    Release Date dcterms:created <date> Date.Created

  • Where

    Property DC/DCterms MMD SOMA
    Production Location dc:spatial - Coverage.Spatial

  • What

    Property DC/DCterms MMD SOMA
    Title dc:title <title> Title
    Type dc:type Type attribute Type
    Duration* dcterms:extent <duration> Format.Extent
    Genre dc:type Genre tag Type
    Subject dc:subject - Subject
    Language dc:language Language attribute Language

Theoretical Model

The theoretical model represents a way to abstract the nature of relationships we analyzed within the event. In general, we distinguished the creation of the items from the items’ features, in order to better conceptualize the overall links. In general this model allows us to answer questions about the nature of the event as well as about the items; we can answer questions about the Who, the When, the Where, the What.

Conceptual Model

In this conceptual model, we linked the theoretical model to existing standards, allowing us to formalize the identified relationships. In general, we tried both to highlight the specifics of each kind while also maintaining consistency with respect to some significant ontologies (especially Dublin Core). While building the model we made some distinctions regarding the kind of metadata needed to sufficiently and extensively describe the resource or entity (* signals a possible unicum in the use of the ontology).
In addition to the widely known DC/DCterms, we employed EBU, Schema.org, CIDOC CRM, Dbpedia-OWL and FRBRER to represent the features of our items.

We came up with four different categories and eight total specifications:

  • Who: People, Band
  • Where: Location
  • When: Date/Feast Day
  • What: Artefacts, Texts, Multimedia, Events

Entity Mapping

After building our final conceptual model, we wanted to visualise in a clear way the mapping of each single entity, and turned to a graphical representation for conveying our work.

Data representation and connection

The last part of our project deals with the representation and connection of the knowledge that we collected. First, we created tables about the items in .csv format. CSV is a non-proprietary format, thus making it well-suited to make knowledge available without software boundaries for the audience of the semantic web.

Subsequently, we turned to the description of the entities. We decided to adopt the album as a focal point, since it was well connected to different kinds of entities and would be more interesting to be analysed. We then proceeded to describe these entities to create our personal URIs about them. The entities are then related to other entities on the web by means of existing Ontologies, Value Vocabularies and Authority Controls. We used in particular VIAF, LCCN, GN and others; if no authority was present we redirected to the Wikipedia page.

Finally, we created an RDF file with all the described entities as well as the album. What follows is a serialisation in Turtle, a well-known format, useful for data interchange: it is hosted on our Github page and embedded as a Gist for displaying purposes. A graphical representation of this serialisation can be viewed here

Data visualisation