MusicKG: Representations of Sound and Music in the Middle Ages as Linked Open Data

The World Wide Web is one of the main ways of accessing knowledge in cultural heritage. Recently, several projects in digital humanities have emerged; however only a few are specialized in musicology. In this paper, we present MusicKG, a multilingual knowledge graph about medieval musicology and musical iconography. A specific ontology has been designed to integrate data from several iconographic and musicology databases. In addition, MusicKG is connected to the Linked Open Data cloud with a significant part of its classes, properties and instances being linked to Wikidata, Getty Vocabularies, MIMO, Iconclass and GeoNames. MusicKG is accessible and reusable by three means: a downloadable RDF dump, a Virtuoso faceted browser and a public SPARQL endpoint. Some representative SPARQL query examples are given to illustrate the scope of MusicKG and to show the potential impact on the research work in medieval musicology.