SKCMBDb: Building the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database in the Slovak Music Centre

This slide deck presents the Open Music Observatory approach to building interoperable, federated data sharing spaces for music and cultural heritage. It outlines how European Interoperability Framework (EIF) principles and Data Sharing Space (DSS) architectures can be applied to connect libraries, rights management organisations, archives, labels, and digital platforms without centralising or replacing existing systems, and takes the creation of the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database with the Slovak Music Centre and SOZA as the example.  

The presentation was made in the General Assembly and Conference of the International Association of Music Information Centres  (IAMIC) on 21 November 2024 where the Slovak Music Centre is a member as part of the series of stakeholder consultations for the Open Music Observatory. 

The presentation introduces practical service integration workflows, Wikibase-based shared namespaces, and automated data curation methods that enable authoritative, reusable metadata for composers, works, recordings, and performances. Through concrete examples from Slovakia and Central Europe, it demonstrates how aligned identifiers, multilingual authority control, and semantic interoperability improve discoverability, reduce duplicated work, and increase the visibility of national and minority repertoires across public catalogues and commercial platforms.

The slides also describe the Open Music Observatory’s role as a service-oriented infrastructure for data repair, validation, and dissemination, including training and capacity building for libraries and rights professionals, and outline both open (publicly funded) and premium data curation services developed within the OpenMusE framework.