Linked Data projects in and of themselves are cool. But sometimes, one of them just stands out as even cooler. Such is the case with Linked Jazz, some 2900-triples strong in the service of identifying and revealing the network of social relationships among the jazz community.

Talk about all that jazz. The effort, led by Cristina Pattuelli, associate professor at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, includes a visualization tool developed by a graduate student there, Matthew Miller, that provides different and compelling ways to explore connections among the jazz greats and the lesser-knowns, as well. You can view individuals based on the number of connections they have, for instance, or on their shared connections.

“It can be used dynamically to click on an artist and see the pattern of all the connections around him, play a clip from YouTube, have a little bio,” Pattuelli says. It’s innovative, she says, because it runs direct from a browser. Read more

iAlbums Alpha has launched utilizing a proprietary semantic curation engine. The article states, “iAlbums is the first major development in on-device music players since the launch of the iPod. A free application in the iPhone app store, iAlbums’ patent pending semantic engine analyzes the music already existing on one’s iPhone or iPod touch and gathers the most relevant and exciting information from over 20 different sources across the web. This content (videos, artwork, photos, artist quotes, lyrics, tweets and more) streams seamlessly into an easy to use feed on the user’s player, providing an all encompassing music experience in an interactive app that enhances the existing music files in their mobile libraries.” Read more

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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Who has had the greatest impact on rock music? It’s a question that still isn’t answered, despite the efforts of Ronald P. Reck, principal at RRecktek LLC, and Kenneth B. Sall, principal systems engineer/XML data analyst at Ken Sall Consulting.

The team wanted to use semantic technology, along with DBpedia and MusicBrainz data sources, to try and figure out the answer. Reck and Sall recently published a paper, Determining the Impact of Eric Clapton on Music Using RDF Graphs: Selected Challenges of Semantics Across and Within Datasets, based on their experiences. Their plan was to use RDF and SPARQL to query properties and relationships among musical artists to reveal their activity, impact and “six degrees of Eric Clapton” connections to other artists.

Reck and Sall initially saw this project as a door-opener to showing relationships between pieces of data, and drawing inferences and conclusions from them, for a more serious purpose: “We were interested in music, but the real application, especially in the government, is tying the clues together, for example, around terrorists,” says Sall. It turns out that musicians and terrorists have some things in common — they tend to have specific roles in their organizations, and may cross-partner with other groups in loose relationships.

While the work didn’t result in answering the original question posed, it did reveal, as Sall puts it, “what can go wrong in doing this kind of semantic analysis.” That’s in itself useful, as it presents an opportunity to find at least some solutions around those pitfalls.

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Google recently announced that they have created a rich snippets format for music. According to the article, “Since we introduced Rich Snippets back in 2009, we’ve created rich snippet formats for a variety of different content types, such as Events, People and Reviews, to show users relevant information about the content they can find on a site. Today, we announced the launch of rich snippets for music. With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly created music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snippet so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to.” Read more

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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MusicBrainz, one of the earliest available LinkedOpenData sets recently discovered that Google uses MusicBrainz data in some of its searches. The article explains, “Earlier this week I met with Shawn Simister, who works on Google’s Freebase project (former from MetaWeb) to touch base about how MusicBrainz is being utilized inside of Google. MusicBrainz represents a large chunk of the music data in Freebase and in turn the Freebase data is used as one of the sources of data for Google’s search.” Read more

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

TV viewers familiar with CBS’ The Big Bang Theory (pictured above) may recall last week’s episode, where one of the characters comes up with an idea for a smart phone app to help solve differential equations. Being that the main characters are all geeks, the app is supposed to solve the kind of incredibly complex problems that only the most brilliant mathematicians and scientists try to tackle. As one character puts it, it will appeal only to about 70 people in the entire world, which means that if it takes off, they could potentially become “hundred-aires.”

Well, in one of those life imitates art moments – sort of – WolframAlpha has just released the first set of a series of “Course Assistant” apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, including calculus and algebra. Where the real deal departs from the TV script is that WA is tackling subjects that have appeal to a lot more of the masses than what The Big Bang guys were working on. Just think back to high school – and college, too, in the case of the Calculus app – and you’ll know what we mean. There’s also a music theory Course Assistant app in the first set of releases.

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