Media

Free tagging by users combined with volunteers who link synonymous tags to canonical ones, keeping the users' words while adding a controlled structure; named by Julia Bullard.

2007 paper by Yves Raimond, Samer Abdallah, Mark Sandler and Frédérick Giasson at ISMIR presenting the Music Ontology, a framework for editorial, cultural and acoustic information about music on the Semantic Web.

2009 ESWC paper by Georgi Kobilarov, Tom Scott, Yves Raimond and colleagues at the BBC and Freie Universität Berlin, describing how BBC Programmes and BBC Music used DBpedia and MusicBrainz identifiers to connect content across the BBC's site.

2009 workshop paper by Oktie Hassanzadeh and Mariano Consens presenting LinkedMDB, linked open data about films and their links to other datasets.

2018 paper by Julia Bullard in Knowledge Organization comparing three user-generated collections that structure their tags through human judgment, and proposing the curated folksonomy as an object of study.

RDF vocabulary for music, first released in 2007, describing artists, works, recordings and releases, and the performances and recordings that connect them as events in time. It reuses FRBR's split between a work and its expressions, and FOAF for people.

The film and television industry's registry of identifiers, founded in October 2010 by MovieLabs, CableLabs, Comcast and Rovi. Every title, edit and version gets a DOI, so studios, broadcasters and streaming services can refer to the same thing.

C2PA's format for cryptographically signed provenance records ('manifests') attached to images, video and other media, recording who made them and how they were edited; version 1.0 appeared in December 2021.

Database of films, television and the people who make them. It began in October 1990 as fan lists on the rec.arts.movies newsgroup, became a company in 1996 and was bought by Amazon in 1998; its data is proprietary, released only for non-commercial use, yet other databases link to its title and name IDs.

Database of CD track listings, started by Ti Kan around 1993 and filled by users who believed it would stay free. It was sold in 1998, renamed Gracenote in 2000 and moved to proprietary terms, which provoked the freedb fork and MusicBrainz.

Open, volunteer-edited database of music metadata, launched in 2000 in reaction to CDDB's enclosure. Its core data has been in the public domain since 2003, and its identifiers anchor the Music Ontology, BBC Music and Wikidata's music items.

User-built database of music releases and marketplace, launched in November 2000; it lists every pressing and edition, with more than 19 million releases by 2026.

Social network launched in 2003 that dominated the late 2000s and became where many musicians hosted their songs. In 2019 it confirmed that about 50 million songs uploaded before 2015 were lost in a server migration.

Fan wiki, started in 2004, that names and catalogues the recurring devices of fiction and links them to the works that use them: a vocabulary of storytelling built entirely by its readers.

The BBC's pages for every programme (from 2007) and every artist (beta from July 2008), each a web page and an RDF description. Artists were keyed on MusicBrainz identifiers and linked to DBpedia, so a public broadcaster built on fan-made data.

Community-built film and television database, started in 2008, whose free API made it the usual open alternative to IMDb for apps.

Linked open data about films, built at the University of Toronto and presented in April 2009, with links from its films to DBpedia and other datasets.

The New York Times's release of its subject headings as linked open data, beginning with about 5,000 people's names on 30 October 2009, mapped by hand to DBpedia and Freebase.

Fan-fiction archive run by the Organization for Transformative Works, open since November 2009. Writers tag freely, and volunteer tag wranglers link the tags to canonical ones, a working middle way between taxonomy and folksonomy; it won a Hugo Award in 2019.

Linked data wrapper for TV Tropes, announced in December 2009, that turns the wiki's pages into RDF linking works of fiction to the tropes they use; by November 2010 about 6,000 of its 16,000 items were linked to DBpedia, and users could correct the extraction.

Approach the BBC used for its 2010 World Cup site: journalists' tags stored in an RDF triplestore against a football ontology and queried with SPARQL to build pages automatically.

American daily newspaper, founded in 1851; in 2009 it published its subject headings as linked open data.

British public service broadcaster, an early large-scale publisher of Linked Data.

Non-profit that has run MusicBrainz since the end of 2004 and funds it by selling commercial access to its live data feed, while the core data stays in the public domain.

Fan-run non-profit founded in 2007 to preserve fan works and defend them as legitimate; it runs Archive of Our Own and the Fanlore wiki.

Standards body formed in February 2021 by Adobe, Microsoft and others to certify the source and editing history of media content.

British professor of signal processing who founded Queen Mary's Centre for Digital Music, and co-author of the Music Ontology paper.

Programmer who created CDDB around 1993 as the track-listing database for his xmcd CD player, filled by users' e-mailed submissions.

English film enthusiast who wrote the search scripts that began IMDb on Usenet in 1990, and who has run it as a company since 1996.

American programmer who founded MusicBrainz in 2000 as an open alternative to CDDB, and led it and the MetaBrainz Foundation until his death in 2026.

Canadian developer who co-edited the Music Ontology specification in 2007 and wrote its early revisions.

Developer who co-founded DBpedia in 2007 and co-wrote its founding paper.

Information scientist who studies classification in volunteer communities and named the curated folksonomy.

American programmer who started Discogs in 2000 while working at Intel.

DFKI researcher who built DBTropes, the linked data version of TV Tropes, and presented it at EKAW 2010 with Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes.

Computer scientist who built the Linked Movie Database at the University of Toronto, presented in 2009.

Music-informatics researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, and co-author of the Music Ontology and its Event Ontology.

Researcher who co-designed the Music Ontology at Queen Mary, University of London, then built linked data for BBC programmes and music.