Thursday, September 18, 2008

SWRLTab and Jess:
In the SWRLTab you can write and edit SWRL rules, infere new knowledge using Jess engine and add the results to the ontology (see here). You need to add the Jess .jar files to BOTH ./plugins/se.liu.ida.JessTab and./plugins/edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl/.




Thursday, August 7, 2008

Shortest list of necessary concepts/properties from mo

The mo is very well designed to be flexible in representing anything in music domain. However for our research purposes we don't need to populate all concepts. The list of concepts that are necessary in our research is as follows:

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Just recently BBC announced transformation of the BBC music to a new beta version which is going to be used as the main BBC music site soon. More information about this is available here also Tom Scot has a post in his blog.

Other related research works such as the BBC music beta lead us to include some ideas in our own research.
  1. BBC music: seems BBC music beta, Zitgist and MusicBrainz (MB) are using the same URI and almost the same data. In fact BBC music beta is using the MB data. The good thing we can get from BBC is that the data is available in htm, xml and rdf, just add the extention to the end of URI. For example the information about artist Adele in rdf and xml. To wrap up we can use the data provided in the above sources with the same URI. "URIs are just identifiers for resources. They shouldn't reflect the taxonomy of the site. The resource should define it's relationships to other resources not the URI. Call them anything you like but just keep them stable."
  2. MusicBrainz: Lets have a look at the MusicBrainz to see how it can help in our research. No need to mention that the music ontology (mo) is highly affected by the MB. Looking at the the object artist for example Madonna: Details gives URI, year, and name for the object. In this case Madonna is an object of MusicArtist subclass of foaf:agent which is connected to a foaf document through biography
    + Aliases is especially useful when an artist goes by different names (misspelling and variants) see Paul Mckarty. I think this is not included in the mo as a property of the MusicArtist but certainly can be useful during the filtering of the data that user had surfed
    + Tags is I think not included in the mo but can be considered as relevant data (list of words that we measure distance of each to the user profile concepts/individuals). list of MB tags is available here
    + Releases lists albums and records of the music artist. In the mo the class release_type relates a musical manifestation to its release type (album, interview, spoken word,... - individuals of this class-)
    + Appears on lists everything that the artist was involved in
    + Similar artists interestingly gives you name of artists that are similar to the music artist to a percentage. This is included in the mo as the unstable property similar_to - a similarity relationships between two objects (so far, either an agent, a signal or a genre)
  3. Genre: To my knowledge MB does not specifically provide the genre for each music artist nor song however tags to them might clarify their genre. However MB provides a link to wikipedia for almost every single artist and album the genre specifically is provided there. The genre of each track in the album is accesible through the album page in the wikipedia. The album page includes links to most track within the album and their specific genre is in the page.
    In mo the property genre connects any sort of events (Recording, Composition, Performance etc.) to the Genre class. The Genre class can use any genre taxonomy plugged into it, for example from list of popular music genres of wiki. the other option is using the musical movements at DBpedia, for example see this.

Sunday, February 17, 2008


I am updating the picture here in June 2008. This image outlines our research scheme.