Terminology

Mapping guidelines

Music professionals

Wikidata uses the human (Q5) class a subclass of person (Q215627) that was defined much later. This often makes the mapping to CIDOC-CRM, RiC and many other ontologies ambiguous, because many persons are lacking a statement about their personhood. In collections management E21 Person (collections) and RiC-E08 (archives) are the most likely anchors of persons who are composers or performers of music.

For our use cases, the differentiation between living and deceased (not to mention imaginary) persons is necessary, so we encourage data curators to use the following mapping when importing their datasets:

  • deceased person: use this preferred label to dead human (Q18093576). Our description: human who is no longer living (equivalent with dead person on Wikidata.)
  • living person: use this preferred label to living human (Q18093573). Description: a human person who is alive, equivalent with living human on Wikidata.

We will add for both deceased person and living person the human statement for compatibility with Wikidata.

  • imaginary person: use this preferred label to the imaginary character (Q115537581). Our description: character known only from narrations (fictional or in a factual manner) without a proof of existence; includes fictional, mythical, legendary or religious characters and similar; equivalent to the the Wikidata item imaginary character. Imaginary persons are not entitled to copyright.

  • deceased creator whose works are no longer protected by copyright: we create an inherited class of deceased person and creator. Creators who are living person or who do not belong to this class are assumed to have their works under copyright protection. Of course, in the case of multi-creator works, we cannot infere a public domain status from this class.

Musical works

Sound recordings

Live public performance