Linked jazz: an exploratory pilot

This paper reports on a pilot conducted within Linked Jazz, a project that investigates the potential of Linked Open Data (LOD) technology to enhance discovery and visibility of digital cultural heritage materials. The project explores the applicability of the Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) ontology to digital archives of jazz history to expose relationships among musicians and reveal their community's network. Finding innovative ways of connecting cultural data and making them searchable in an open discovery environment generates unprecedented opportunities to create new meaning and elicit new streams of interpretation. The project consists of multiple phases and is intended to progress in an iterative and experimental way. The first step was to pilot a method to create a dataset of RDF triples representing jazz artists and their social connections.