• The Song Category got reworked, adding new search power for instruments used in songs and for genres of songs. Even though at this moment there are 138 individual songs documented, we have increased the semantic cross-referencing to make this category more useful. So in addition to the new search functions, Songs are now also appearing on the ARTIST page of the original performer and if a song is included in a RECORD this is shown on the song page as well. This might be more valid for modern artists and songs, but this will also be useful for modern re-enactments of traditional songs.
• Further history articles have been started (and are waiting to be filled): Five Dynasties, History of Cantopop, History of Shidaiqu and History of Music during the People’s Republic of China.
• The recent music timeline of Xi’an got updated to reflect the demolition of music venues around the South Gate at the beginning of this year.
• A new short link page for quick contributions to the wiki has been set up and put online.

Two new tools have been implemented for Chinese music reseachers (and the general interested):

• A “cite this page” function, similar to Wikipedia, which gives you the choice of a number of established citation formats.
• Search functionality for Category:Songs that enables everyone to semantically search through the documented songs and list out according to GENRE and INSTRUMENT featured.

Here is the screenshot a sample search looking for songs that feature ‘Guitar’s:

• The extensive guqin website of John Thompson was included in the our reference list.
• New articles have been started such as Qin Monk Faction, Zhu Wenji, Yan Cheng, Bo Ya, etc.
• Our history breakdown into dynasties got extended:

• Each history article also received a map showing the geographical span of each dynasty. In future we hope to be able to add an interactive map to each article.
• In discussion with John Thompson, we have defined ways between traditional music of China and how Westerners defined music,

The following has happened since our last newsletter:

• A media center has been set up where everyone is free to contribute media files or sources to media files along with explanations on copyright, etc. The National Museum of China has already granted us permission to use their photographs for our project.
• The main article History of music in China is being split up with more sub-articles, e.g. Shang Dynasty Music, as can be seen in the History Template:

• An interactive timeline has been introduced showing the various music histories and timesline available. (Note: BC dates are not supported, error message has been logged)

• We got feedback from various corners of the world showing interest in the project, such as emeritus professors from the University of Yale all the way to Guqin Associations.
• Emails have been issued to all major institutions and associations in the field.
• Additional references and sources have been identified, such as the UNESCO Document Database

With April 1st being around the corner as official start date, please spread the word and register at the Wiki to start contributing to human knowledge.

Invitations have been issued to the University of Aarhus, the University of Heidelberg, DianMo – Sinology Student Newspaper of Leipzig, Kulturgut 文化财富 China, Hamburger China-Notizen, the China Media Project at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre (The University of Hong Kong), Das Reispapier, the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Indiana, the University of Wien, the Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (CHINOPERL) (中國演唱文藝研究會), the Association for Chinese Music Research, the Society of Asian Music, the International Insitute of Asian Studies, the Centre of Chinese Studies (SOAS), CHIME, the Centre of Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Department of the History of Art of the University of Yale and the Department for East Asia Languages and Literatures of the University of Yale.

We are very proud that our project attracted so much attention not just overseas, but also in China itself, so that the guys of Painkiller decided to include the CD as free gimnick in their magazine to be distributed nation-wide!!!

For those who haven’t listened to the CD yet, get a free download copy here!

Hail metal!!!

Let’s have a look at a Chinese music genre called Hua’er (of which above screenshot is taken). At wikipedia one will not find too much information about Hua’er, except one sentence:

Hua’er, a form popular in the northwestern China provinces such as Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai, named to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009

At Music-China.org however you will find:

• An official UNESCO youtube video showcasting the music style
• A semantical relationship between Hua’er and other music styles (Folk, Mountain Songs)
• Open, exportable RDF about the genre including a Dublin Core abstract
• A brief explanation as well as genre scene information as published by the Ministry of Culture of China (as public domain)
• An overview of recent developments for preservation and safeguardsing as described in the UNESCO nomination letter in 2009.
• The opportunity to mark songs and artists with this particular genre, i.e. making it semantic and linked! (and thereby exportable via RDF!)

In short, Music-China.org provides every user the opportunity to combine as many sources as possible and include the information on the wiki. Wikipedia in theory has the same functionality, however a different mission statement! Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which wants to describe any given topic in a neutral point of view on a precise yet also brief way. Gig listings, such as on artists pages (see Subs), re-iterations of lengthy sections of legal documents (see Hua’er) or individual concert reviews (see Suffocated) as references would never have a chance of passing the notability criteria of Wikipedia. And that is the strength of Music-China.org! Everyone can enter as much data about a topic as he or she wants to without the fear of strong notability requirements (see our own).

Surplus – and that is something that Wikipedia has NOT yet implemented on their own system – every data entered at RiC / MCN can be exported or called upon via RDF! We are semantic and very much alive!

Another example to show why Rock in China and Music-China.org are the better choice!

Our very own Cui Jian page compared to the Wikipedia one:

• Wikipedia: 2112 words
• RiC / MCN: 9039 words

Surplus, Wikipedia is listing Cui Jian at RiC as External Link and thereby as reference for everyone who wants to know more than the brief encyclopedic entry that WP provides.

Additionally RiC / MCN features

• numerous music videos of Cui Jian that are collected via the Freebase / Google / Youtube API connection, RiC
• an up-to-date system crawl for articles and books about Cui Jian in the “Further information” section
• semantic annotations for the place of origin, Cui Jian’s main genre, his records and his musicbrainz UID

Need more examples? Check out this table:

Previously being lone pages that by hand were featured on our main page, events have become far more lively thanks to the magic worked by Semantic Mediawiki! As you can see in the above screenshot, we feature a moveable timeline showing all documented events in the system, starting with the latest one. As we haven’t entered all events with semantics, only a handful show up, such as

• Antidote 11: Consume
• 330 Metal Festival 2012

Our stylish new form is asking for a few of the key facts of every event:

• Poster
• Title
• Start date & time, End date & time
• Organizer (you can add more than one)
• Event Location (you can add more than one, e.g. for JUE festival, Beijing and Shanghai)
• Participants (i.e. bands and artists)

These data will then be included in a factbox to the right of the page and a brief section about the bands is being added:

To be honest, our events section is not as advanced as our artist page, but there are already a few cool effects we have added to make your data input more than just a plain events page:

Special events are being displayed on the VENUE page of the event, e.g. check out the Starlive or the Shanghai MAO live house page which display these events in a nice gallery:

With release of SMW 1.8 and SMR 1.8 (incl. its enhanced gallery function) we hope to roll out this special treatment with backlinks to the event not just on venue pages but also on artists pages and on city pages. Surplus there are plans to make all events available based on genre selection (but that will require a little bit more magic beans).

For more info on our semantic implementation of events, its properties and class equivalences, check out our Semantic Approach project page.

Within our wiki there are two distinct categories and data classes being used for sometimes (confusingly) the same thing:

• Artists –> Category:Artists
• Persons –> Category:People

Whereas the first category contains BOTH musical groups AND musical (solo) artists, the second group comprises of only individual persons. For standard band / musician formations that is easy to implement, e.g. Kaiser Kuo is a musician playing in the band Spring Autumn and hence Kaiser Kuo is categorized as a PERSON and Spring Autumn is categorized as an ARTIST.

However if one looks at e.g. Jiebing Chen one notices that two pages are being setup:

1. Jiebing Chen
2. Jiebing Chen (Artist)

It is necessary to set up two pages (that are interlinked) as both classes are storing different properties which are not the same. E.g. the INSTRUMENT that a person plays is stored on the PERSON class, whereas the YOUTUBEID with an example song is stored on the ARTIST class.

Reason behind is that (usually) a PERSON is adopting an ARTIST NAME or a STAGE PRESENCE or an IMAGINATIVE FIGURE to perform. E.g. a lot of Hongkong pop singers adopt an English name instead of their Cantonese birth name for recording and publishing music. Hence all MUSIC-related activities that are related to the STAGE NAME are being documented on the ARTIST page. All PERSON-related activities (filmography, early life, death, etc.) is documented on the PERSON page.

Folk artists not necessarily adopt a specific name for their music activities (such as Jiebing Chen above), however folk artists are often present in more than one band or project. As such the PERSON page is the more important of the two for these musicians and all their own musician activities would become documented within e.g. Jiebing Chen (Artist) or any of the project / groups / bands the musician played with.

If that gets complicated, think of COMEDIANS and how they usually have certain fixed ROLES they enact on stage. Some of these comedians release CDs or DVDs solely about one ROLE and some of them even go as far as enact that ROLE in their daily life. E.g. German comedian Hape Kerkeling has the following roles:

1. Evje van Dampen
2. Gisela
3. Günther Warnke
4. Hannilein
5. Horst Schlämmer
6. Rico Mielke
7. R.I.P. Uli
8. Siegfried Schwäbli
9. Uschi Blum
10. Wolfgang

out of which Horst Schlämmer got his own movie, own TV appearances and own cinema advertisements. Yet Horst Schlämmer is not Hape Kerkeling as it is just a stage presence created for a purpose of distributing comedy.

There is no system in the world that can truely map all the nuances and details present in human life, yet we hope that this system brings the ideal of mapping music close enough.

This is a part of our always expanding STYLEGUIDE.

Away with that! With some mediawiki magic thrown into the bucket things are up to speed and you can enjoy our website in real-time! Check it out!

By the way… as shown in above API Statistics screenshot… we have crossed 11 million pageviews!

That is being made possible by the semantic property GeoLocation which is to be entered on any venue form. E.g. on the page of D-22 the geographical location 39° 59′ 27″ N, 116° 19′ 4″ E is being mentioned. This property is being called up on the city page along with all other Beijing venue geodata to be displayed on a Google Map.

Next to map there is our standard box with general information about the city including its name (English, Chinese, Pinyin), its semantic relationship to it being a province, as well as three magic numbers that are being generated from our semantic database:

• Number of bands associated
• Number of venues in town
• Number of musicians born or died in town

These figures are automatically compiled using the data entered on either ARTIST pages, VENUE pages or PEOPLE pages. When you click on the links for (show all), you will see the individual lists.

Additionally as on most other pages, also the Template:Definitions is being set that allows to semantically connect a city to the same entity at either wikipedia, dbpedia or freebase.

Our magic template {{ArticleinPage}} is also working on city pages and relates any ARTICLE that has been tagged with Beijing to this city page.

Here is a little Infographic that shows the interwiki relations:

As always, all semantic relations, including the band / musician / venue relations are available as RDF Export on the city page (e.g. RDF Export for Beijing). And via the semantic linkage to the Open Linked Data Cloud (sameas property to dbpedia, etc.), all data can be entered and re-used!

Above is a snapshot from our semantic data project page showing two template codes that can be used on various pages in the system.

The first one is used to manually add music videos to e.g. Artist pages, Record Pages, Song pages, Opera pages, etc. etc. in addition to the Youtube ID that should have been already entered in the respective page form. Everytime a YOUTUBE ID is entered in such a way, a property (Hasvideo) is set that links the page with the youtube video and makes it available in our system to be called upon from any other page. For more on video at RiC / MCN, please have a look at our article on how to add videos.

The second template called Template:FreeDownload is used to refer any page, e.g. ARTIST, RECORD, SONG, etc. with an URL that either contains a MP3 file or that contains some kind of method to download legal and free music (e.g. imusicbox.hk). Once again, with every used template for a download, the URL is being attributed to the property (mo:free_download) and can be used throughout the whole system, e.g. on our Downloads page in the Songs section. If you “edit” that section you see the actual called upon code:

{| class="wikitable" border=1 cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="80%"
!Artist Image
!Artist Name
!Free Download Link (either MP3 or URL)
|-
{{#ask: [[Category:Artists]] [[mo:free_download::+]]
|?Image
|?mo:free_download
|mainlabel=Artist
|format=template
|template=ShowDownloadTable
}}
|}

With that magic word “ask” and the query behind that every free download within our system and linked on an Artist page can be called upon.

Next up in our spell book is the Template:ArticleinPage which is very close to Template:Booksinpage. It basically crawls through the Category:Articles and searchs for any article or blog entry or journal article or scientific paper that has been tagged with the name of the page on which this template is mentioned. E.g. on Carsick Cars it will find two articles:

• Pete DeMola (2010), At That Moment I Thought, I Thought I Really Saw Music, published on 20 July 2010
• Alex Hoban (2009), Turning Japanese heads to China: The Shanghai scene, published on 4 August 2009

and include them at the place of the template. Hence no more copy & past for interview articles, just one entry with the Form:Add a New Article and voila, the article will appear on the band page.

Next on the list of magic spells is the semantic definition foaf:made:: within the Discography section:

== Discography ==
=== Albums ===
<gallery>
Image:xxx|[[Foaf:made::Title (Artist)|Title]] - Year
</gallery>

When entering an album on the page of a band (still needs to be done manually), then one has to include the prefix Foaf:made:: before the actual title, e.g. [[foaf:made::You Can Listen, You Can Talk (Carsick Cars)|You Can Listen, You Can Talk]] as shown in

Image:CSC-YCLYCT.jpg|[[foaf:made::You Can Listen, You Can Talk (Carsick Cars)|You Can Listen, You Can Talk]] – 2009, June

That way we will be able to recognize which record belongs to a band. For sure a similar reference is being set on a record page but as there will always be more band pages than record pages, this way no information is lost. Surplus we use this method to be able to find RECORD pages based on properties set on ARTIST pages. Think, all records from metal bands formed in 1999.

Summing up: There are a lot of templates available (with most of them being explained on our semantic approach project page) that not only add value to an individual page, but also to the whole system and other pages. Last but not least, by using the templates and magic words additional properties are set for individual pages. Properties that can be exported via RDF (see example RDF export for Carsick Cars) and re-used in other pages.

First of all, when opening a page, e.g. Carsick Cars, any reader is giving two visual impressions of the band:

• a band photo (as before)
• and a Youtube video (for everyone outside of China)

The other standard data such as Artist Origin, name, Genre and other information is as usual displayed in the table underneath the profile pic and now also within two additional boxes before the general history starts:

This data is not entered anymore with a simple wiki template in wiki code but we are offering a standard form that can be reached by the “edit with form” tag on top of the artist page.

This form is generated via the Semantic Forms extension and each input in this form will not only appear on the ARTIST page itself, but will also be used on other pages. E.g. When one enters a GENRE or several genres into the respective field, our system understands that Carsick Cars is e.g. a ROCK and an INDIE artist. As such on the respective genre pages, the band would appear in the band list, its records in the record list, and, if a youtube video ID is entered, also in the list of randomly selected music videos.

When the ORIGIN or PRESENT LOCATION of a band is entered, e.g. Beijing or Wuhan, then the artist gets automatically associated with the city and the band count on the CITY page is going up by one.

Coming to the next new feature: semantic connections to the Open Linked Data world in the web! Sounds… unmusical? unsure what it means? Basically with the following wiki template that is being placed on nearly every site of RockinChina & Music-China we are connecting our system with the systems of the web:

Called “Definitions” one has the option to enter a number of URIs or Links to major websites such as

• Wikipedia
• DBPedia (same as wikipedia, just semantic)
• Freebase
• Musicbrainz
• Youtube

We use these links to enable the following:

There are two collapsible tables at the bottom of the page:

• Further videos – which uses the “Freebase ID” (/m/……) to call up to 50 music videos about the ARTIST from Youtube and include them in our system
• Further definitions – which uses semantic data linking (sameas or foaf:primaryTopic) to link our ARTIST page to corresponding ARTIST pages in the web

What are the benefits?

1. With the semantic linking we can tell the machines in the world that our CARSICK CARS artist is the same CARSICK CARS artist as already written about on Wikipedia, Freebase, Musicbrainz and DBPedia, and well… yes also the same CARSICK CARS that has an automatic youtube channel!
2. Machines and humans alike can now check out the other pages and compare the content and information. In the future it will be also possible for machines and persons that are on Youtube or that surf on Wikipedia to understand that RockinChina and Music-China has also a page and probably with more content. So Chinese artists will be found more easily.
3. All the data that is entered about an ARTIST, such as the image, the name, the founding city, can not be attributed not only on RockinChina but also on DBPedia. Machines know that CARSICK CARS on DBPedia is the same CARSICK CARS as on RockinChina. But only on RockinChina the complete data set is available. DBPedia can now import the data set and complete their data along with a reference link to the extensive history page at Rock in China.
4. The same is true for Musicbrainz, which is already in talks to use Rock in China as an official whitelisted database! With semantics in place, it will be possible to update either our records or the musicbrainz ones respectively!
5. In conclusion that means: Whenever you enter data at Rock in China about a Chinese band, you will feed the Open Linked Data cloud with this data and enable the world to learn about the band, the artist, the record, the music scene of China!

With our new semantic approach, there are a lot of things possible! To give you a little guideway in which way you can use Rock in China and Music-China, here is our first post about GENRE pages.

The above and below screenshots are taken from the page Rock of our system. Whereas in the past we only had a little bit of text on each artist page telling the genre, the same is now a semantic link directing readers to a genre page about e.g. Rock music. There are already a lot of Genre pages set up, so if you want to discover new music in let’s say “Traditional” or “Punk“, just check out the genre pages.

Our genre pages are built up as follows:

• Top left part: a randomly selected YOUTUBE video of an artists that is tagged with the genre. In this case SAUL was selected by the system – not a bad choice. When you click on the “show” part of the red box additional infos are being shown about the artist.
• Top Right part: a automatic alphabetical list of all artists tagged with the genre tag. If there are more than 30 entries, a “Further results” is displayed showing you the rest of the artists. For sure, our original category “Rock Artists” is still available and is automatically updated.

Scrolling down you see the following:

Four boxes with automatically generated content relevant to ROCK:

• A definition field that tells you about the connection of this Genre to other Genres within our system, i.e. which other genres belong to ROCK. Surplus we have implemented semantic relations to outside pages, predominantly Wikipedia  and DBpedia, for web crawlers to understand the relations and for you to quickly read up on the history of ROCK in general or e.g. of Funk.
• A randomly generated list of records from ROCK artists. Again with a Further results list.
• A list of all articles that are entered in the Article Category that are tagged with ROCK, chronologically ordered.
• A list of all books that are entered in the Book Category that are tagged with ROCK.

Thereafter, as in every wiki page, individual content can be added, as e.g. is done at the “Jiangnan Sizhu” genre page (a traditional music genre from China). And last but not least this shows up:

The category for Genre is automatically set and below that is the magic Factbox that will appear on all semantic data pages of our wiki. it shows all mentioned PROPERTIES and its related VALUES, in this example the relation of our ROCK page to wikipedia (foat:primaryTopic) and our relation to dbpedia (sameas).

On the right side of the factbox you see “RDF feed” which will open in a XML file with all the properties and values for our genre page ROCK included (as well as incoming property statements). This is the page that can be web crawled, e.g. by Google, DBpedia, Freebase, BBC Music or any other service collecting music data. It can be web crawled and it can be understood due to the category tag GENRE and our SAMEAS relation to DBPedia.

Seen the above, compare that to what was possible in October 2012:

• A category list with artists individually mentioned as “Rock Artists”

Now? All our pages are magically connected, giving you always the relevant content first and offering you options on how to discover new and unknown artists.

Rock in China has expanded over the course of November. As already announced on Facebook, we got an additional domain: www.music-china.org. And along with it we got a broader perspective on the music we want to make accessible for readers worldwide!

Underground & Rock music is the core of Rock in China with over 1500 artists, numerous records, articles, books and videos for the interested mind. Now we plan (and have partially already implemented) to do the same for pop/mainstream music, traditional folk music, Chinese opera and Western classical music.

It is our aim to become the biggest world-wide free accessible wiki for Chinese music. This site is non-commercial and will stay so! Everybody collected by the community becomes open content to be re-used and enjoyed! With a few exceptions (whereever noted) all content is available for sharing, especially with our new feature: RDF!

What does that mean? That means if you have a music website and you want to have a list of all Chinese artists that are out there along with their city of origin and when they started to rock out, then you can call upon our database and get that information as RDF export in XML. For free, for re-using, for making sure that Chinese music gets out into the world! How it works? Read it up on our semantic approach article, which explains our data structure, semantic properties and softwares we use.

And to not boast too much about it, Music-China.org along with Rockinchina.com is already now the biggest English archive and database for Chinese music. Why? See for yourself:

• Wikipedia (Category Chinese Musical Groups): 33 entries
• Metal Archives (Country:China): 173 entries
• Musicbrainz (country:CN search): 373 entries
• Music-China.org / RockinChina.com (category Artists): 2047 entries

Please help us to work on the database to make it even bigger, even more awesome, even more knowledgeable.

German TV station ZDF showed a special about Chinese trance, electro and minimal music, starting with a party on the Great Wall and commentary by Zhang Youdai and Elvis. T.

Kuddos to Rene for pointing that one out.

Check out Pangbianr’s lengthly interview with Jerry Chan, founder of The Beijinger about his involvement in the punk underground and the scene in late 90s / beginning 00s.

Photo: Ricky of Rustic, totally unrelated to the interview.

Rock in China is featuring two new sections on our wiki Main Page:

• Music Downloads
• Who’s that band? (Band Introductions)

Everytime you are visiting our main page, a randomly selected FREE online download of Chinese music is shown along with a random band introduction to some of the hottest bands of China! Come again, come often!