Matching Entities, a Generic Algorithm

In music or any data-related field, enriching data from an external source is a common still tedious task. External data can come from open datasets like wikipedia, web crawling (if legal) or any other data sources. The main idea is that you own locally your dataset, public or not, and you want to enrich it with public and rich data. In music, Musicbrainz and Discogs publish such datasets, that can be used for matching. As I recently worked with the RISM dataset (Répertoire International des Sources Musicale), I will use this as an example, to match person entities.

However, the algorithm I’ll build for you is source and field (and language) agnostic.

Classical Metadata: the Artists Issue

Classical music is one of the genre which has been put aside from the global evolution of streaming music online.

Streaming music started of mainstream music, where each ‘song’ has one title and one artist. It was good enough for many genres but never fit classical music, for several reasons: