The School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University in London just received a grant to implement a new RDF based web service and a SPARQL endpoint for this web service.

The grant will be administered by Queen Mary University and will mean that one developer will be paid for one year to work on this project. This developer will be part of the MusicBrainz development team and will take part in our usual activities, meetings and code review process.

While we have an RDF based web service already, its worth noting that this has been stale for many years and has not been developed in favor of our XML web service. The XML web service has seen an amazing adoption and it would seem that having another web service would be superfluous. They key here is that the Linked Data world (formerly the semantic web) predominantly uses RDF as its preferred means of linking data. In order for MusicBrainz to continue to be well linked to the Linked Data world, it is important for us to continue to support an RDF web service. This grant very cleanly supports this goal and it also shows that the academic world thinks that MusicBrainz is of value and that it should be supported.

Congratulations to the Queen Mary University team that worked on this application! For nearly all of the gory details (the detailed budget figures have been stripped from the application for privacy sake) please see the PDF grant application.

I will be working with the hired developer to write up a detailed wiki page that will explain this project in much more detail. In the meantime if you have any questions, please read the grant application.

Congratulations to the whole team at Queen Mary University London!