A few weeks back I had the good fortune to be handed a dump of a mysql database stuffed to the gills with historical Proms data. It's got every Prom from 1895 to 2007 (and (you'd hope) 2008 at some point).

I've started to wrap a Ruby on Rails app around it and the results can be seen here. For now it's pretty basic with lots of gaps left to fill but the intention is to link it to MusicBrainz / DBpedia and publish the results into the Linking Open Data cloud.

In the meantime I thought it might be interesting to develop the site in public so you can see all my mistakes in real time. So I'll be posting progress reports here and updating this post as things get added.

What's happened so far

I wrapped a very basic rails app over the data just to peek inside and check the relationships. The result was a simple domain model of people and works and events and etc.

The next step was to create a new rails app and begin to build the site one table at a time. The beginnings of the schema are here.

What happens next

The next step is to continue on, one table at a time through parts and events and performance and etc to fill out the site. And when that's done the interesting work of linking to external data sources can begin. At which point I'll probably be buying drinks for colleagues old and new.

With the data published and linked I'll hopefully manage to persuade boss type people to open it under a creative commons non-commercial licence. Add some RDF and the Proms can join Later, Top of the Pops and John Peel on the LOD cloud. Well that's the plan.

A beta (of a beta (of a beta...))

This is very much work in progress. Eventually the data should make it's way into /music (via the MusicBrainz next generation schema) and the upcoming /events. If we can match events to broadcasts some of it should also make it into /programmes.

Updates