In this rather speculative talk, I'll pitch ideas around music and knowledge graphs. I'll describe a little experiment I conducted on a weekend involving electric guitars, a jam on a boat, music technology from the 1980s, and languages to represent knowledge graphs on the Web. I'll then discuss how a fun exercise can potentially be turned into meaningful research questions.

1. ‹#› Het begint met een idee
1 Het begint met een idee
Thesis submitted & just approved
“Refining Statistical Data on the
Web”
 60% of time is spent on data
preparation
 Intelligent solutions for statistical data
integration on the Web
 Use case on structured Humanities data
Something different!
1 Faculty / department / title presentation
WHY THIS TALK?

2. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 Maybe not that different…
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SEMANTIC WEB AND THE HUMANITIES

3. ‹#› Het begint met een idee

4. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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ISWC 2013 JAM SESSION
Jam’s “metadata”

5. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Besides how awesome this is…
 The jam became global (i.e. de-referenceable URIs from
anywhere) rather than local
> But any video stream would have been more accurate (for humans)
 The jam became machine readable
> But not all of it
 Digital music as Linked Data?
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REPRESENTING MUSIC IN RDF

6. ‹#› Het begint met een idee
HOW DOES A KNOWLEDGE
GRAPH SOUND LIKE?
(OR: MUSIC IS A GRAPH)

7. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 Music representation format which is 100% digital
> (i.e. leaving nothing to analog signals  actual instruments)
 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
> Universal synthesizer interface
> Roland (I. Kakehashi), Yamaha, Korg, Kawai (1981)
> Digital, fine-grained representation of musical tracks and events
> Wide range of controllers and instruments
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WEEKEND EXPERIMENT

8. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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MIDI

9. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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MIDI2RDF
https://github.com/albertmeronyo/midi2rdf

10. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 Music representation format which is
> 100% digital (i.e. leaving nothing to analog signals)
> Secundary list
 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
> Universal synthesizer interface
> Roland (I. Kakehashi), Yamaha, Korg, Kawai (1981)
> Digital, fine-grained representation of musical events
> Wide range of controllers and instruments
10
WEEKEND EXPERIMENT

11. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 midi2rdf
> Any MIDI to an RDF midi-comptabile representation
> All MIDI resources get URIs (can link, be linked, de-referenced)
> Music is a graph!
 rdf2midi
> Round trip conversion
> Lossless!
> MIDI subseteq RDF
 playrdf.sh
> RDF files can be ‘played’ without data loss
> Demo
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LOSSLESS CONVERSION

12. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 Enrichment of musical assets and events in Linked Data
> Annotations
> Provenance
> Links to places, people, events
> Music stream = live representation of music on play
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APPLICATIONS (I)

13. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 Musical representation of knowledge graphs
> Just as we care about visualization of knowledge graphs
> Linkage of graph resources/properties to things that can be played
> Size = pitch
> Regularity = harmony (irregularity = dissonance)
> Graph musical navigation
> Music stream = navigation path
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APPLICATIONS (II)

14. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

15. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Questions, comments, suggestions most welcome
@albertmeronyo
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THANK YOU!