Research Seminars

An ontology-based laboratory workbench and music information system

Yves Raymond and Samer Abdallah, Centre for Digital Music, QMUL

Wednesday 1 December 2004 4:00pm, Room 203

Abstract

Information management systems are becoming an increasingly important part of many music related technologies, ranging from the management of personal music collections, through to the construction of large databases intended to support complex high-level `semantic' queries. In parallel with this, the development of systems to automate the analysis of music depends on the availability of large annotated music databases to support systematic evaluation. In many cases, the resulting computational systems will produce a large amount of data, including intermediate representations and the results of parameter space explorations; this body of data brings its own information management problems.

We present the initial stages of an information system designed to manage in a uniform way these complex information structures, covering both the production of music (what is commonly termed music 'metadata') and the computational systems used to analyse that music. The information is structured around a formal conceptualisation of the entities and relationships in the domain (that is, an ontology) specified using the semantic web description logic language OWL-DL, which has a well-defined (model theoretic) semantics and can support a wide range of logical inferences.

The database is made available as a web service, and is intended to form the basis of a sort of `laboratory workbench,' supporting collaborative research by providing annotated collections of test data, and, crucially, the logical structure required to build resuable, persistent collections of analysis results. To this end, we have also implemented, amongst others, a Prolog client with a Prolog-to-Matlab interface, in which the logic-programming language provides a uniform interface for querying, inference, and computation, including numerical and graphical work via the attached Matlab engine.