FOAF from Audiscrobbler

Semantic Web 1 Minute

Whilst upgrading my Audioscrobbler WinAmp plugin today to be conformant to the latest submission protocol (my RESTful redesign didn’t gain any traction unfortunately) I discovered that they’re been busy on their web services interface.
Alongside the original RSS 1.0 “recent tracks” feed, there is now an RSS 2.0 feed, a plain text version, and a FOAF export of your profile. They’ve been careful to add holdsAccount properties to associate you with your profile, link to your RSS feed, and even include a list of your friends. Nicely done.
I’ve a few nits though:

  • Their use of foaf:depiction is non-standard. I don’t have an avatar image set up, so apparently this is a picture of me. It would be better to omit the property entirely in this case. However because some people don’t use photos of themselves as their avatar image (perfectly reasonable) you even get odd assertions when there is a photo. Check out Matt Biddulph. I think what we’re missing is an additional avatarImage property that could be associated with an OnlineAccount.
  • They've made sure that they don't publish email addresses, they don't add an mbox_sha1sum property for friends, making it difficult to merge in data
  • The rdf:seeAlso to the RSS 1.0 version of "Recent Tracks" could be typed to identify it as an rss:channel

Beyond that, it's all good! I do hope they get round to fixing up with RSS 1.0 feeds soon though -- these are all broken because of their use of a placeholder URI instead of the MusicBrainz URL for a given track.
Very nice to see a service exposing data in this way.

Published by Leigh Dodds

Director of Delivery @ODIHQ. Chair of @BathHacked. Author of @datapatterns. Proud Dad.

Published