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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Image Photo Courtesy Flickr/401(K) 2012

Universities play an important role in advancing the technology ecosystem, semantic technology included. Look for starters at work done at The Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wright State University’s Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, MIT, and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute located at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

In addition to driving technology ever forward, institutions like these and others also provide a home for incubating good ideas that could become good businesses. Music discovery service Seevl and the enterprise-focused SindiceTech are two examples of semantic spin-outs from DERI, for instance, while MIT Media Lab gave birth to commercial properties with semantic underpinnings including music intelligence platform The Echo Nest. The Kno.e.sis Center points work it’s doing in the commercial direction, too: Its LinkedIn profile description notes that its “work is predominantly multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional, often involving industry collaborations and significant systems developing, with an eye towards real-world impact, technology licensing, and commercialization.”

Given the projects with commercial prospects underway within their own houses, it would seem there’s opportunity for universities themselves to look for even more ways to contribute to that success. And that’s just what the University of Minnesota is doing: This week it said that it’s launching a $20 million seed fund over a ten-year timeframe to support the innovative ideas to which its campus plays host.

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Conor Harrington of Galway Independent reports, “A spin-out company from NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) has been accepted into the prestigious incubation centre, Dogpatch Labs, which has its European headquarters in Dublin. Seevl, is a music discovery tool which contextualises users’ music listening experience online and then allows them to discover new music, and is designed to benefit both those who listen to and who create music. It was founded two years ago by two researchers at DERI, Dr Alexandre Passant and Julie Letierce, taking on a third employee last year.” Read more

Seevl is looking for a Frontend Engineer in Galway, Ireland. According to the company, “We are a small and growing start-up, starving to build beautiful products for music junkies. We are looking for people that share our vision, have a passion for music and a nerdiness for all things data-related… We are currently hiring our first full-time engineer to join the team! We are looking for a talented and passionate individual that will work essentially on front-end development (HTML5, CSS, JQuery and friends, mobile frameworks) but who can easily switch to back-end when needed (Python, APIs, JSON).” 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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[Editor's Note: This is Juan Sequeda's final report from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 5 of ISWC 2011 was the third full day and last day of the conference. It started with a keynote from Gerhard Weikum title “For a few more triples“. The rest of the day consisted of sessions on Outrageous Ideas, Social Web, In-Use: Content Management,  Ontology Evaluation, Ontology Matching and Mapping, User Interaction and In Use: Applications. The highlight of the day was the Closing Ceremony, where the winners of several prizes were announced.
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[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 4 of ISWC 2011 was the second full day of the conference and started out with a keynote from Frank van Harmelen, titled “10 Years of Semantic Web: does it work in theory?“  There were several sessions on RDF Querying of Multiple Sources, RDF Data Analysis, Formal Ontology & Patterns, Knowledge Representation Semantics, Web of Data, MANCHustifications and Provenance, the In Use track on Environmental data, the Semantic Web Challenge and a very exciting Deathmatch panel.

The main question addressed in the keynote was if a decade of Semantic Web work has helped to discover any Computer Science laws? Frank stated that what has been built in the past 10 years can be characterized in 3 parts:
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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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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