SEKO

SEKO3

Voluntary project on developing SEKO, the Finnish medium of performance vocabulary into a service with a multilingual linked data ontology and classification.

Project title: “SEKO3 – Musiikin kulttuuriperinnön yhteentoimivat tietoaineistot”

Project objective

To develop a long-term service to support Finnish music content and instrument description based on a trilingual linked data ontology of instruments and ensembles with adding a Finnish language version of an instrument classification.

Working titles for the service:

• “Suomalainen esityskokoonpano-ontologia”
• “Finsk ontologi för musikbesättning”
• “Finnish Medium of Performance Ontology”

Purpose

To help the Finnish GLAM network of libraries and museum collections to do music content description more easily and to increase interoprability of the vocabulary and collections by adding Swedish and English labels and mappings to corresponding concepts in Wikidata, Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus for Music LCMPT, YSO-ontology, and MIMO thesaurus.

Specific emphasis will be based on covering Finnish musical instruments extensively to support the preservation of the Finnish cultural heritage. Incorporating these would transform SEKO3 from a general medium-of-performance vocabulary to be also the definitive linked-data reference for Finnish and Karelian organology — a unique international contribution that no other national ontology can offer, and one that strongly justifies further investment.

Documentation

Datamodel
Masterdata structure
New and deprecated concepts in Masterdata
Classification
Sources for music instruments and their labels
Wiki (guidelines, plans, etc)
Soitinnimien ohjeluettelo (2017) (copy of archived version)

Activites

Go to previous activities log

2026-08 AUGUST

Week 32 - Networking, planning, documenting

• Added a note on SEKO3-KOKO integration possibility to improve usability in GLAM-sector collections.
• Emall exchange started with MUUSA, the MIMO network, the National Library and the Music Archive. Received the original full MIMO vocabulary files. Registered for the MIMO General Annual Meeting in Riga, 9-10 Sepetember which has a presentation on Vocabularies.
• Studied the Leisiö dissertation in 1983 and made a table of the 120 instrumnent “types” listed, as well as the 120 instruments describe by Minna Hokka website.
  • These will be mapped together into a single file, and also mapped to Seko. Their classification is close to H-S so mapping to it would be done, too.
  • Probably at least 60 fo these instruments are not in the current Seko.
  • Probably these listtings would be added to the SEKO3 Wiki under 03 Research notes - now there are “placeholder” lists only.
  • Finding and adding the most used alternative labels would require deeper research into Leisiö’s book which has an extensive index of instrument labels and an organological section, too. Filter to only those that are actually used in publications and collections.
• Contined working on a concise project plan and timetable. Current estimate for a timespan is 24 moonths to complete the different plans and to get quality assurance by music metadata specialists.
• Mapped matching instrument Iconclass classes to Masterdata table with finto.fi url:s.

Week 33 - vacationing…

• Started re-defining the scope of the project to three distinct work packages:
  • Seko translation, concept mapping and re-structuring to support interoperability and linked data,
  • Classification translation and class mapping to Seko instruments to support discovery and science,
  • Extending with the traditional instruments to support the cultural heritage work at museums and archives.
• Images of instruments could be linked from the concepts with a property like schema:image or foaf:depiction or wdt:P18.
  • Possible image sources finna.fi or wikimedia commons. However, an easier approach would be just map with seeAlso to pages that include images?
  • Worked on LCMPT and LCSH label lists for mappings. LCSH has 884 instrument and ensemble concepts with 1416 entry terms. LCMPT has 903 concepts with 1554 entry terms.

Background

The project process is done in accordance with the Finnish expert group on music metadata (MUUSA) which maintains the current Seko vocabulary.

See also “Finto-palvelun ontologiat ja sanastot musiikinkuvailussa” - presentation in 2021 10.5281/zenodo.21360307.

Specific spatial and cultural information inside the current Seko instrument descriptions will be entered as structured linked data using e.g. YSO, YSO time, YSO-places ontologyies, Wikidata or Geospaces, etc. and formed as definition and scope notes.

The Seko dataset consist currently of some 1200-1300 concepts of musical instruments and ensembles. The classification would be based on the MIMO dataset from 2011 and its addtions in 2018. ] Funding applications pending. Contact Jarmo Saarikko if you are interested in joining or sharing your expertise.

Data model of the vocabulary / ontology

• The Seko datamodel (classes and properties) is still work in progress. At first, the ontology will be a simple hierarchy, with mappings to other vocabularies and datasets when PIDs are available and to other external sources.
• The hierarchy matches closeoly the Hornboschel-Sachs classification by MIMO.
• The datamodel will be documented in SKOS turtle format.
• See the separate Datamodel description page.

Mappings

During the process we map items in Wikidata with the corresponding SEKO-ID (P10063). To support mappings, see also other identifiers in Wikidata LCMPT ID (P8516) and MIMO instrument ID (P3763), UNIMARC: Medium of Performance ID (P11214), MusicBrainz instrument ID (P1330).

The skos:MappingRelations properties will be used to link to external sources. Preferrably with exactMatch, but also closeMatch, broadMatch and narrowMatch may be used when an exact match is not available.

Current plan is to map to Wikidata and to an external authority file. Wikidata mapping would be considered mandatory. The existing LCMPT mappings are checked and their coverage extended. Possibly map to any vocabulary that Finnish music archives and museums are currently using.

• Primary targets are Wikidata, LCMPT, YSO
• Secondary targets are MIMO instrument vocabulary, Hornboschel-Sachs classification (maintained by MIMO), KOKO.
• Other possible targets are Getty AAT (for instruments)
• Links to other sources describing the instrument and to help in content description may be added with the rdfs:seeAlso property.

Classification

• See the separate document on the use of classifications in the ontology

Library data: BIBFRAME and MARC21

For content description purposes the appropriate concepts in SEKO3 could be marked as instances of bf:MusicEnsemble or bf:MusicInstrument or bf:MusicMedium</b>.

• Classes seko:MusicInstrument and seko:MusicEnsemble were added in version 0.04 of the datamodel and these were mapped to the corresponding Bibframe classes.

In MARC21 data records the labels of SEKO concepts can be used in the 382 field and other fields. The MARC21 source code identifier for the vocabulary is “seko” (subfield $2 value)

Museums and Archives - SEKO3 and KOKO ontology

Museums and instrument collections

Finnish museums are already using KOKO ontology. One sggestion and an easy solution would be to include SEKO3 to KOKO.

• Museum data is already imported to finna.fi system. The expansion of SEKO3 into a KOKO-compatible ontology would significantly improve the discoverability and cross-linkability of music-related materials (recordings, sheet music, archival materials and physical museum objects) in, for example, the Finna.fi service.
• SEKO3 masterdata-table is already mapped to YSO-concepts. Thus it could be considered an “YSO-based ontology”.
  • The Top Concept “esityskokoonpano” is currently not in YSO, BUT the two second level concepts are mapped: yso:p7110 “soittimet”, yso:p1289 “esittäjät”
• SEKO3 is hierarchical and trilingual. What else would be needed to be able to include SEKO3 in KOKO?
• Content description in Finnish Museums: https://www.museovirasto.fi/fi/palvelut-ja-ohjeet/museoalan-kehittaminen
  • Museovirasto 2015: Suositus museoille ontologioiden, luokitusjärjestelmien ja asiasanastojen käytöstä versio 2.0
  • Suositus: Ontologioita suositellaan käytettävän ensisijaisina välineinä museoiden objektien kuvailussa. Keskeisin objektien kuvailussa käytettävä ontologia on suomalaisia ontologioita yhdistävä KOKO-yleiskäsiteontologia … KOKOn ohella voidaan käyttää myös muita ontologioita.
  • Suositus: Suositeltavaa on käyttää laajasti käytettyjä ja tunnettuja kansainvälisiä luokitusjärjestelmiä. Classification systems mentioned: Outline of Cultural materials (OCM), Iconclass - also on finto.fi, IPTC NewsCodes: Subject Codes (for photographs) - all preferrably in ontologized versions.

Music archives

• connections not known at the moment. Check Finna-LIDO import rules.

Data

The source data is is comprised of three datasets that will be worked in parallel and eventually can be combined into an unified interoperable lined data service.

• First, the current dataset of Seko of 1241 titles.
• Second, the Hornbostel-Sachs classification by MIMO which, when translated in Finnish, can be used as an optional browsing interface to the Seko instrument data as well as serve music and organological research and teaching.
• Third, a vocabulary of the Finnish-Karelian traditional instruments, many of them not currently available in online interoperable voacabularies, but are represented in Finnish collections and research publications and some of them available through finna.fi and Europeana.
  • Outside of the scope, but it might also be possible to develop this separately as an ontology of folk instruments of the peoples speaking Finnic languages or even a Scandinavian-Baltic-Finnic folk instrument ontology, which might be a valuable resource for research and collections.

Seko data

• The content and structure of the current monolingual Seko dataset is decided by the Finnish Expert Group on Music Metadata (MUUSA).
• As of 2026-06 the original dataset is maintained as MARC21 Authority files on the national metadata repository Melinda (ALEPH library system) hosted by the National Library of Finland. The data is transformed and exported in SKOS format (RDF) to Finto-data repository at https://github.com/NatLibFi/Finto-data/tree/master/vocabularies/seko. This data is browsable through the Finto service https://finto.fi/seko/en/ (a Skosmos syste,). The latest changes to the data were committed in 2021-09-28 and the metadata of the whole dataset was updated in 2025-05-21.
• The editorial unfinished work in progress on the new multilingual SEKO3 version may be viewed “live” in the Google sheets. Occasionally we may take snapshots of this file in CSV format. This dataset is not yet available in RDF format.
  • Live view: masterdata-table (5200+ rows, 31 columns)