'This Song is Everybody’s' is a digital research and cataloguing environment edited by Nikos Ordoulidis, designed to showcase the power of the ReasonableGraph platform by mapping the vast, transcultural journey of a single shared tune across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East, and beyond. Taking historic audio recordings as its primary point of departure, the project uses the IFLA LRM model to structure an intricate data network that transcends traditional national music historiographies.

Rather than following a rigid, linear narrative, the platform invites users on an exploratory journey through some 280 interlinked entities, demonstrating how disparate archival fragments can be organically connected. Within this single case study, users can discover and cross-examine:

• Some 55 Persons, including composers, performers (such as Roza Eskenazi, Safiye Aylâ, and Naftule Brandwein), recording experts (such as Frederick William Gaisberg), early researchers and collectors (such as Léon Azoulay and Samuel Baud-Bovy), and modern scholars.
• Some 35 Geographic Places, from cities of recording and publication such as Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Baku, Leipzig, New York, and Kolkata, to the wider regions where the songs circulated.
• 30 Recordings, from 1900 to 2016, alongside some 35 Physical Manifestations (78 rpm records, LPs, and manuscript and printed sources) and 40 Digital Items (digitised sound and video, and images such as scanned record labels).
• Some 35 Organisations, mostly record companies and labels (such as The Gramophone Company, Victor, and Odeon), together with archives, libraries, and collections (such as the Kounadis Family Archive and the Archives de la Parole).

By carefully delineating complex relationships—such as distinguishing shared poetic matrices (like the verses documented by Arnold Passow in 1860) from distinct modal and melodic realities (such as Hitzaz/Hitzaskiar)—the project illustrates how ReasonableGraph turns complex bibliographic and semantic metadata into an intuitive, pragmatic tool for cultural musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and digital humanists eager to uncover the hidden webs binding global musical repertoires together.

Note: All audio files, labels, and visual media utilised within this pilot demonstration have been borrowed from external digital archives for educational purposes, aiming to showcase the capabilities of modern semantic web technologies. The source from which each item originates is being recorded in its record.