1  Introduction

Task 5.1 Adding Economy, Diversity, Innovation and Society, Citizenship Pillars to the MVP of the Open Music Observatory and raising it to at least TLR Level 7 is a cornerstone task of the OpenMusE project. It focuses on the ultimate ambition of the project, focusing on creating and validating the technological, service and governance components of an observatory that can become the basis of a future European Music Observatory.

Deliverable 5.1 Open Music Observatory is the most important milestone of this task, the actual release of the Open Music Observatory on the world wide web.

The present report is an accompanying document to the deliverable. Its aim is to explain the workings of the Observatory, the concepts underlying its development, and our plans to further develop it to achieve our ultimate ambition that it can become a basis for a future European Music Observatory.

After the Executive summary and this introduction (Chapter 1), our report is structured as follows:

Chapter 2 introduces the history of the plans to set up a European music observatory and a decentralised approach, the creation of CEEMID–a background of the Open Music Europe project and an important building block established in the EMO feasibility study. We then conceptualise the Open Music Observatory as a data (sharing) space, a novel technical and legal innovation of the European Union. We place an emphasis on compliance with the European Interoperability Framework and embracing the open collaboration method, open source software and open data as fundamental building blocks. At last, we review a few observatories, including the ones that were reviewed in the EMO feasibility study to see what services they offer in 2024, and how our service structure compares to theirs.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of the current, core services of the Observatory, which can be seen as the services of a modern statistical vendor and open data portal. In line with the EIF, we integrate our services into the EU Open Data portal (as our main gateway to disseminate statistical datasets), the Europeana and the European Culture Heritage Cloud (for music collections), and Wikipedia’s ecosystem (Wikidata and Wikibase) to disseminate data to open knowledge graphs.

Chapter 4 introduces our digital curation guidelines and the nucleus of our data offering. Prior to the release of Observatory 2.0, we could not start ingesting large and valuable datasets, so the catalogue currently contains datasets only from the background IP of the Open Music Europe project. Our data can already be tried out, and we plan to showcase the first extensive datasets and onboarding case studies at several international conferences in November 2025. One of these large-scale case studies is already underway, and it will be introduced later in Section 3.1.1.

Chapter 5 revisits the EMO feasibility study and provides an updated landscape on data availability and potential data partners in the EU. At the time of writing the feasibility study, many pan-European music organisations promised data to a new observatory. We will introduce them the new Open Data Observatory and will invite them to the Observatory Stakeholder Network, and ask to give us at least sample datasets for publication.

Chapter 6 shows the data and terminology standardisation work started by the Open Music Observatory. The feasibility study correctly identified this as a key, missing function. We divide this standardisation into three parts:

• standardisation of music-related of conceptual and information model related to the data we want to collect and disseminate;

• a standardisation of entity identities such as author name, works, recordings;

• standardisation of music-related and cross-domain concepts, such as “average income” or “composer” or “lyricist”.

Chapter 7, which provides an overview of the “Observatory 3.0” concept, presenting some of our planned value-added services that aim to embrace the idea of trustworthy data and use of trustworthy AI for the benefit of the music sector fully. We also briefly introduce the innovative services that that consortium partners are planning with the machine-actionable data our APIs will provide them.

Chapter 8 provides a conclusion along with a technical and governance roadmap to deliver a full-fledged Open Music Observatory, which may be adopted by the relevant stakeholders as a European Music Observatory by the end of our project. It embraces the technology of linked open data, the connection of open and enterprise knowledge graphs, and interoperability system of the data sharing space model. We are piloting this structure in the Slovak Republic, where we will be introducing in November the Slovak Music Datapsace with rich applications. This dataspaces can federated with similar national, genre- or sub-sector specific data sharing building blocks into a truly pan-European music observatory.

Annexes to the report showcase documents that provide further insight to the status and the workings of the Open Music Observatory.