Semantic annotation of digital music

In 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.

► Currently internet searching for digital music items produces unsatisfactory results. ► Semantic annotation can significantly enhance search and retrieval of music items. ► We propose Mpeg-7Music ontology for semantic annotation of digital music items. ► Mpeg-7Music was mapped to MPEG-7 Audio data types and encoded in OWL1.0. ► Mpeg-7Music novelty: Creation of a bridge between music consumersʼ tags and Mpeg7.