Scholarly Music Editions as Graph: Semantic Modelling of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe

This paper presents a first draft of the ongoing research at the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe (Basel, CH) to apply RDF-based semantic models for the purpose of a scholarly digital music edition. A brief overview of different historical positions to approach music from a graph-theoretical perspective is followed by a list of music-related and other RDF vocabularies that may support this goal, such as MusicOWL, DoReMus, CIDOC CRMinf, or the NIE-INE ontologies. Using the example of some of Webern's sketches for two drafted Goethe settings (M306 & M307), a preliminary graph-based model for philological knowledge and processes is envisioned, which incorporates existing ontologies from the context of cultural heritage and music. Finally, possible use-cases, and the consequences of such an approach to scholarly music editions, are discussed.