Linked Jazz 52nd Street is a crowdsourcing tool that functions as an essential part of the overall Linked Jazz project. Linked Jazz 52nd Street invites users to select the type of relationship shared by jazz musicians based on short excerpts of interview transcripts pulled from jazz history archives. The relationships that users choose contribute to the Linked Open Data semantics on these jazz musicians.

How exactly does that work? User contributions to Linked Jazz 52nd Street fill in the blanks for computers. Before a user chooses a relationship, the computer only knows that Musician A and Musician B have some sort of relationship. Using the Linked Jazz 52nd Street interface, users can tell the computer that Musician A was the mentor of Musician B, that Musician C has met Musician D, and that Musician X toured with Musician Y. These relationships are then translated into Linked Open Data readable by computers, which can then be manipulated to visualize the jazz community network. Each choice that a user makes thus contributes to a richer and more sophisticated understanding of the complex relationships within the jazz community.

This is a prototype tool under active development, if you have any comments or ideas we would love to hear them!