Cataloguing and Searching Musical Sound Recordings in an Ontology-Based Information System

Abstract

Although a lot of information is available worldwide, getting the right piece of information is challenging. In addition, integrating information from different sources is still very complicated. To make the different information systems to interoperate, it is necessary to provide common knowledge structures. Ontologies have been developed for making the semantics of a domain explicit. However, using such formal structures is not straightforward and their benefits are not clear to the users. The work presented in this paper explores the use of an ontology for musical sound recordings in order to allow cataloguing and searching for such information. Therefore it investigates how the knowledge society can benefit from ontologies, with focus on the culture, more specifically the music domain. Some possible benefits and pitfalls are also described and a case study shows an evaluation of the proposed approach by users of this domain.