Exchanging musical metadata with IncipitSearch

IncipitSearch is a search engine for music-incipits. Incipts are a pragmatic approach for the cataloguing of notated music, in which a few bars of a score are transcribed. Concurrently, statements about the melodic characteristics of the music can occasionally be made on basis of these short fragments. Still, the IncipitSearch considers itself primarily as a counterpart to conventional thematic-bibliographical catalogues, as they have been presented in printed form for a long time.

Integration of repositories

• different types of repositories (digital / analogue source catalogues, work catalogues etc.)

• different types of integrated data (RDF/XML, MARC XML, HTML)

• data aggregation via custom crawlers or IncipitSearch RDF metadata format in Turtle Serialization

IncipitSearch API

• all aggregated content available as open data

• JSON API: elasticsearch endpoint

• can be used to implement incipit search functionality in other repositories

RDF metadata format

• using schema.org vocabulary to add semantic information to web content

• data type MusicComposition with own extension MusicIncipit

• JSON-LD serialization to enrich web output