Seevl, the free music discovery service that leverages semantic technology to help users conduct searches across a world of facts-in-combination to find new musical experiences and artist information, has launched an app for Deezer that will formally go live Monday.  (See our in-depth look at Seevl here, and a screencast of how the service works here.) Deezer is a music streaming service available in more than 150 countries – not the U.S. yet, though – that claims more than 20 million users.

Seevl, which late last year updated its YouTube plug-in with more music discovery features and better integration with the YouTube user interface, models its data in RDF. In a blog post earlier this year, founder and CEO Alexandre Passant explained how the Seevl service uses Redis for simple key-value queries and SPARQL for some more complex operations, like recommendations or social network analysis, as well as provenance. As for the new Deezer app, it provides the same features as the YouTube app for easily navigating and discovering music among millions of tracks, Passant tells the Semantic Web Blog.

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Seevl, the music discovery service built on Semantic Technology that I wrote about a few months ago, has released a significant update to their plugin for YouTube. The plugin is still only available for the Google Chrome browser, but other browser plugins are in the works. You can grab the Chrome plugin here.

Once the plugin is installed, the user has new options available when visiting YouTube. First, there’s a new search option next to the standard YouTube search bar.

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Alexandre Passant

Q: How would you describe Seevl?

A: We initially defined ourselves solely as a music discovery website, and we’re now developing several products around the data we gathered for building it. Our main focus is to bring context to music, and we want to help people to know more about the cultural and musical universe of the bands they like, to discover new ones and most importantly, to understand the connections between all.

Q: Where does the name “Seevl” come from?

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“Hello my name is Eric and I am addicted to music.” Needless to say, I was thrilled when I received one of the early invitations to join Spotify (http://Spotify.com) when it launched recently in the US (if you’re not familiar with Spotify, here’s a good introduction). The service offers a catalog of +15,000,000 tracks, and the audio quality has been consistently excellent.

However, there is one area where I find Spotify severely lacking – discovery.  Fortunately, I work in the Semantic Web world, and I recently had the opportunity to play around with Seevl.net, a music discovery service that leverages semantic technology.  It’s impressive, and I often find myself using Seevl.net to augment Spotify.

So what is Seevl?
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I sat down with Dr. Alexandre Passant, of DERI NUI Galway, to discuss his recent research projects entitled “sparqlPuSh” and “SMOB.” SparqlPuSh combines Google’s PubSubHubbub, SPARQL, and SPARQL updates for proactive notifications in RDF stores. The interface was designed to be plugged on top of an RDF store. SMOB is a distributed microblogging system that reuses similar principles to enable privacy in microblogging, and won a Google research award. The full specification of sparqlPuSHcan be found on the Google code website.

Passant began by discussing the real-time web and applications that utilize citizen sensing. Practical applications are being developed that combine sensors and social data to solve real-world problems. Passant said “The web is now being looked at like a large information stream.We can use this stream to build real-time semantic applications.” He quoted a recent paper from WWW2010 entitled “Earthquake Shakes Twitter Users:Real-time Event Detection by Social Sensors.”  In this paper the authors discuss how they semantically analyze a tweet and how each user is regarded as a “sensor” in the application.

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Alexandre Passant of DERI Galway recently launched a new web service called seevl, and will speak about it further at June’s SemTech Conference. According to Passant, seevl “reinvents music discovery. We provide new ways to explore the cultural and musical universe of your favorite artists and to discover new ones by understanding how they are connected. In addition, we let you comment every piece of data about them.” Read more

The presence of presence as part of unified communications deployments increasingly is being felt by enterprise users. It’s paying off in better productivity, but it’s when presence gets semantic that the real magic can start to happen.

That’s something that DERI and Cisco, as part of the multi-party Lion2: Enabling Networked Knowledge project funded by Science Foundation Ireland, are exploring. The idea is to “bring more granularity and more meaning to presence than state,” says Cisco lead architect Keith Griffin – that is, an indication that you are available or away. After all, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t necessarily mean you are fully or even partially available, and just because you are on the phone doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t free to respond to instant messages. “The Semantic Web provides more intelligence to that.”

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There were a lot of articles and blog postings written about the Semantic Technology Conference. Below is a list of those we are aware of.  If you know of others, feel free to send them to us at info (at) semanticuniverse.com so we can add them to this list.

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