A Case Study in Pragmatism: exploring the practical failure modes of Linked Data as applied to classical music catalogues

For the last decade efforts have been made in building the Linked Data enabled Semantic Web. Some of the earliest efforts in publishing Linked Data included music-specific corpora, modeled using e.g. the Music Ontology. Given that, one might assume creating a Linked Data client in the music domain would be a reasonably straight-forward process. The reality of the situation is not so simple. In this paper, we present a case study in building a real-world web-service that makes use of third-party Linked Data resources: libmus. We describe the variety of difficulties in reliably linking to several external sources. These range from poor data coverage, to serialization consistency, to sporadic availability. We outline the ways in which we have coped with these problems within the libmus system. These include: local caching of third-party data to enable search, screen-scraping to expand data availability, and automatically generated regular expressions to emulate fuzzy search. Finally, we will consider how the Linked Data ecosystem can be improved to mitigate these problems in other systems and what this means for the future of the Linked Data Web.