The HaMSE Ontology: Using Semantic Technologies to support Music Representation Interoperability and Musicological Analysis (original) (raw)

Assessing Music Ontologies for the development of a complex database

The increasing volume and diversity of musical information have been creating a challenge for the uniform creation, reuse, and sharing of this kind of information. As part of addressing this challenge, there has been a growing interest in musical ontologies, as a technique to support the sharing of heterogeneous musical information, both for commercial and cultural dissemination purposes. Motivated by a specific objective, in the context of the development of an information system on musicians and respective artistic production and professional career, existing ontologies for the music domain, in general, were surveyed. The purpose of this study is to support the hypothesis that this approach can not only support the specific requirement of that objective but also facilitate interoperability with other existing systems, with databases and catalogs built with multiple technical solutions.

Ontological Representation of Audio Features

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

Feature extraction algorithms in Music Informatics aim at deriving statistical and semantic information directly from audio signals. These may be ranging from energies in several frequency bands to musical information such as key, chords or rhythm. There is an increasing diversity and complexity of features and algorithms in this domain and applications call for a common structured representation to facilitate interoperability, reproducibility and machine interpretability. We propose a solution relying on Semantic Web technologies that is designed to serve a dual purpose (1) to represent computational workflows of audio features and (2) to provide a common structure for feature data to enable the use of Open Linked Data principles and technologies in Music Informatics. The Audio Feature Ontology is based on the analysis of existing tools and music informatics literature, which was instrumental in guiding the ontology engineering process. The ontology provides a descriptive framework for expressing different conceptualisations of the audio feature extraction domain and enables designing linked data formats for representing feature data. In this paper, we discuss important modelling decisions and introduce a harmonised ontology library consisting of modular interlinked ontologies that describe the different entities and activities involved in music creation, production and publishing.

A Brief Foray Into Music Ontology

As one who is, generally speaking, more of a musician than a philosopher, yet one who is compelled for various reasons to undertake a study of philosophical thinking, I have decided that it would be worthwhile to take a look at my own music from an ontological standpoint, and see how it fits within determinations of those more properly considered to be philosophers. A good starting point would be to determine what it is I actually create, and from there to describe how my music is performed, played, or otherwise instantiated. Continuing from there, I can delineate some ways in which my music can be thought of, and determine if these delineations can or cannot be in alignment with the arguments of others. This allows for a fresh perspective from one who makes music, and a point of view which may offer distinctive points of departure from the likes of those more succinctly devoted to philosophical thought. In this way I hope to mediate or reconcile my own views of what my music is with the views of other philosophers in terms of how it can be categorized in relation to other music, and what its properties are in a metaphysical sense. When speaking of the attributes or properties of the music I instantiate, I immediately enter into the arena of musical ontology. The questions I specifically want to ask about my music are in reference to the writings of musical ontologists Peter Kivy, Julian Dodd, and Jerrold Levinson. Though my own music is largely different than the music discussed by the likes of Kivy and Levinson, who tend to focus on traditional classical music of the Western tradition, I will assert in this essay that on most levels my music is qualified to be included in their arguments. Levinson and Kivy can provide a momentum toward determining exactly how well the music which I create will fit within the overall musical ontology of Julian Dodd, who develops and defends what I see as a fairly robust systematization of a musical Platonism. The analysis of my music with regard to Dodd however, will require an expanded definition of what musical archetypes consist of. This definition involves two additional and directly related ideas which I will refer to as speciations and reflexive prototypes, to be discussed later.

The Music Note Ontology

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

In this paper we propose the Music Note Ontology, an ontology for modelling music notes and their realisation. The ontology addresses the relation between a note represented in a symbolic representation system, and its realisation, i.e. a musical performance. This work therefore aims to solve the modelling and representation issues that arise when analysing the relationships between abstract symbolic features and the corresponding physical features of an audio signal. The ontology is composed of three different Ontology Design Patterns (ODP), which model the structure of the score (Score Part Pattern), the note in the symbolic notation (Music Note Pattern) and its realisation (Musical Object Pattern).

Linked Data and You: Bringing Music Research Software into the Semantic Web

Journal of New Music Research, 2010

The promise of the Semantic Web is to democratise access to data, allowing anyone to make use of and contribute back to the global store of knowledge. Within the scope of the OMRAS2 Music Information Retrieval project, we have made use of and contributed to Semantic Web technologies for purposes ranging from the publication of music recording metadata to the online dissemination of results from audio analysis algorithms. In this paper, we assess the extent to which our tools and frameworks can assist in research and facilitate distributed work among audio and music researchers, and enumerate and motivate further steps to improve collaborative efforts in music informatics using the Semantic Web. To this end, we review some of the tools developed by the OMRAS2 project, examine the extent to which our work reflects the Semantic Web paradigm, and discuss some of the remaining work needed to fulfil the promise of online music informatics research.

Music domain ontology applications for intelligent web searching

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. Three important technologies for developing the Semantic Web are already in place: Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Web Ontology Language (OWL). An ontology language is a formal language used to encode ontologies. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. Many disciplines now develop standardized ontologies that domain experts can use to share and annotate information in their fields, and which can be used for reasoning about the objects within a particular domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them. In this work, we develop an ontology of Argentinean music. Despite being highly specific, we illustrate how such an ontology can be expanded and used in applications that carry out complex music related searches. These applications can be embedded later on in electronic devices with some form of wireless networking capability, such as mobile phones, enriching their current functionality.

The Jazz Ontology: A semantic model and large-scale RDF repositories for jazz

Journal of Web Semantics, 2022

Jazz is a musical tradition that is just over 100 years old; unlike in other Western musical traditions, improvisation plays a central role in jazz. Modelling the domain of jazz poses some ontological challenges due to specificities in musical content and performance practice, such as band lineup fluidity and importance of short melodic patterns for improvisation. This paper presents the Jazz Ontology-a semantic model that addresses these challenges. Additionally, the model also describes workflows for annotating recordings with melody transcriptions and for pattern search. The Jazz Ontology incorporates existing standards and ontologies such as FRBR and the Music Ontology. The ontology has been assessed by examining how well it supports describing and merging existing datasets and whether it facilitates novel discoveries in a music browsing application. The utility of the ontology is also demonstrated in a novel framework for managing jazz related music information. This involves the population of the Jazz Ontology with the metadata from large scale audio and bibliographic corpora (the Jazz Encyclopedia and the Jazz Discography). The resulting RDF datasets were merged and linked to existing Linked Open Data resources. These datasets are publicly available and are driving an online application that is being used by jazz researchers and music lovers for the systematic study of jazz.