Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Semantic annotation of digital music

AbstractIn recent times, digital music items on the internet have been evolving in a vast information space where consumers try to find/locate the piece of music of their choice by means of search engines. The current trend of searching for music by means of music consumersʼ keywords/tags is unable to provide satisfactory search results. It is argued that search and retrieval of music can be significantly improved provided end-usersʼ tags are associated with semantic information in terms of acoustic metadata – the latter being easy to extract automatically from digital music items. This paper presents a lightweight ontology that will enable music producers to annotate music against MPEG-7 description (with its acoustic metadata) and the generated annotation may in turn be used to deliver meaningful search results. Several potential multimedia ontologies have been explored and a music annotation ontology, named mpeg-7Music, has been designed so that it can be used as a backbone for annotating music items

Using TREC for cross-comparison between classic IR and ontology-based search models at a Web scale

The construction of standard datasets and benchmarks to evaluate ontology-based search approaches and to compare then against baseline IR models is a major open problem in the semantic technologies community. In this paper we propose a novel evaluation benchmark for ontology-based IR models based on an adaptation of the well-known Cranfield paradigm (Cleverdon, 1967) traditionally used by the IR community. The proposed benchmark comprises: 1) a text document collection, 2) a set of queries and their corresponding document relevance judgments and 3) a set of ontologies and Knowledge Bases covering the query topics. The document collection and the set of queries and judgments are taken from one of the most widely used datasets in the IR community, the TREC Web track. As a use case example we apply the proposed benchmark to compare a real ontology-based search model (Fernandez, et al., 2008) against the best IR systems of TREC 9 and TREC 2001 competitions. A deep analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of this benchmark and a discussion of how it can be used to evaluate other ontology-based search systems is also included at the end of the paper

A multicriteria ant colony algorithm for generating music playlists

In this paper we address the problem of music playlist generation based on the user-personalized specification of context information. We propose a generic semantic multicriteria ant colony algorithm capable of dealing with domain-specific problems by the use of ontologies. It also employs any associated metadata defined in the search space to feed its solution-building process and considers any restrictions the user may have specified. An example is given of the use of the algorithm for the problem of automatic generation of music playlists, some experimental results are presented and the behavior of the approach is explained in different situations. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under the funding project CENIT-MIOI CENIT-2008 1019 and by the Microsoft Research Labs (Cambridge) under the "Create, Play and Learn" program.Mocholi Agües, JA.; Martinez Valero, VM.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; Catalá Bolós, A. (2012). A multicriteria ant colony algorithm for generating music playlists. Expert Systems with Applications. 39(3):2270-2278. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2011.07.131S2270227839

Publishing Music Similarity Features on the Semantic Web.

We describe the process of collecting, organising and publishing a large set of music similarity features produced by the SoundBite [10] playlist generator tool. These data can be a valuable asset in the development and evaluation of new Music Information Retrieval algorithms. They can also be used in Web-based music search and retrieval applications. For this reason, we make a database of features available on the Semantic Web via a SPARQL end-point, which can be used in Linked Data services. We provide examples of using the data in a research tool, as well as in a simple web application which responds to audio queries and finds a set of similar tracks in our database

Social shaping of digital publishing: exploring the interplay between culture and technology

The processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing since the advent of the Web. In recent years, the open access movement has been a major driver of scholarly communication, and change is also evident in other fields such as e-government and e-learning. Whilst many changes are driven by technological advances, an altered social reality is also pushing the boundaries of digital publishing. With 23 articles and 10 posters, Elpub 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing and explores the interplay between culture and technology. This book contains the proceedings of the conference, consisting of 11 accepted full articles and 12 articles accepted as extended abstracts. The articles are presented in groups, and cover the topics: digital scholarship and publishing; special archives; libraries and repositories; digital texts and readings; and future solutions and innovations. Offering an overview of the current situation and exploring the trends of the future, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves digital publishing

End-user storytelling with a CIDOC CRM - based semantic wiki

International audienceThis paper presents the current state of an experiment intended to use the CIDOC CRM as a knowledge representation language. STEM freshers freely constitute groups of 2 to 4 members and choose a theme; groups have to model, structure, write and present a story within a web-hosted semantic wiki. The main part of the CIDOC CRM is used as an ontological core where students are hanging up classes and properties of the domain related to the story. The hypothesis is made that once the entry ticket has been paid, the CRM guides the end-user in a fairly natural manner for reading - and writing - the story. The intermediary assessment of the wikis allowed us to detect confusion between immaterial work and (physical) realisation of the work; and difficulty in having event-centred modelling. Final assessment results are satisfactory but may be improved. Some groups did not acquire modelling abilities - although this is a central issue in a semantic web course. Results also indicate that the scope of the course (semantic web) is somewhat too ambitious. This experience was performed in order to attract students to computer science studies but it did not produce the expected results. It did however succeed in arousing student interest, and it may contribute to the dissemination of ontologies and to making CIDOC CRM widespread