Combining Social Music and Semantic Web for music-related recommender systems

Alexandre Passant, DERI, NUI GalwayYves Raimond, BBC, UK

http://flickr.com/photos/8049973@N03/2656140464/ by wolf.tone

Social Data on The Web @ ISWC2008Karlsruhe, 27th October 2008

Combining Social Music and Semantic Web for music-related recommender systems

Alexandre Passant, DERI, NUI GalwayYves Raimond, BBC, UK

Agenda• Web 2.0, Social Music and the

Semantic Web• Identity, social-networking and social

data with FOAF and SIOC• Linking Open Data and augmented

tagging with MOAT• Recommendation systems• Examples of LOD-based

recommendations • Use-cases

Web 2.0 and Social Music• Term coined from last.fm• In this talk:

• Social networks from music-related services

• Interlinking music-related data

• Music-related weblogging and tagging

Semantic Social Music

Hyperlink

Web:Documents and

hyperlinks

Semantic Social Music

Hyperlink

Listens to Alexandre Passant Franz Ferdinand

Web:Documents and

hyperlinks

Interpretation

Semantic Social Music

Hyperlink

Listens to Alexandre Passant Franz Ferdinand

<http://dbtune.org/last-fm/terraces>

foaf:Person

<http://zitgist.com/music/artist/aa7a2827-

f74b-473c-bd79-03d065835cf7>

rdf:type

ex:listensTo

mo:MusicArtist

rdf:type

Web:Documents and

hyperlinks

Semantic Web:Data, models

and relationships

Interpretation

Limits of Web 2.0 services• Data models

• Each service uses its own model / API

• Need to build specific services

• Documents, hyperlinks rather than concepts and relationships

• Closed worlds• How to share data and connect people

between websites ?

• Social Network Fatigue (Fitzpatrick, 2007)

• The Semantic Web can help !

Unifying Social Networks

Unifying Social Networks

FOAF exporters examples

Unifiying identity• One exporter = One URI

• lastfm:bob, myspace:bobby, facebook:bob77 ...

• A need to unify one’s identity across services by defining equivalent URIs• Explicit: owl:sameAs

• Implicit: foaf:email, foaf:openid

• Both use reasoning principles

• Interlinking distributed social networks

Merging networks• A complete decentralized social graph• Open, distributed, build on standards• From various services

(Kinsella, 2007)

Modeling Web 2.0 content• SIOC: Semantically-Interlinked Online

Communities• http://sioc-project.org

• An ontology to describe activities of online communities and their Social Media Contributions (SMC)• Common semantics for SMC modeling

• Reusing existing ontologies (FOAF, DC ...)

• W3C Member submission, June 2007• http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02

The SIOC Model

http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec

People, accounts and data

http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/01/04/dataportabilityorg-web-standards-sioc-and-foaf/

The LOD Initiative• Linking Open Data

• http://linkeddata.org

• Lots of information available on the Web• Closed world, proprietary data silos

• Provide it in RDF and interlink it !• From documents to machine-understandable data

• Use links to discover data by browsing the GGG

• Open licensing policy

• ISWC2008 tutorial on Linked Data

The LOD cloud

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

Music-related open data• http://dbtune.org

• Music-related RDF platform

• LOD-exporters for major music databases and social services• MusicBrainz, Jamendo

• Last.fm, MySpace

• Interlinked with references datasets• Geonames, DBPedia, riese, FOAF

• Advanced querying and browsing features

Tagging with URIs ?

• Indexing data with Semantic Web concepts defined by URIs• Solves ambiguity / heterogeneity problems

thanks to understandable identifiers

• Interlinking content thanks to Linked Data

• Challenges • How to find URIs related to a given tag

and define new ones ?

• How to let people easily bridge this gap between tagging and semantic indexing ?

MOAT• Meaning Of A Tag

• http://moat-project.org

• A model to represent the meaning of tags• “apple” can refer to various things, but when

I tag this blog post with it, I mean the record company, not the fruit

• A collaborative and open-source framework• A tag server to define and share meanings

• http://lodr.info

Music recommendations• Collaborative filtering

• http://last.fm/

• Long tail?

• Content-based analysis• Texture, rhythm, harmony, ...

• http://www.mufin.com/

• Long tail!

• Lack of cultural context

• Hybrid recommenders

Linked Data !

• Lots of cultural context• Suggests musical resources using

linked data:• Distributed social networks

• SMC and tagged content

• Linked data available within the LOD project

• Related work: FOAF-ing the music

Examples

Social Networking

• You may like what your friends are listening to ...

:alex :yvesfoaf:knows

foaf:topic_interest

dbpedia:Ramones

Social Networking

• ... and also the friends of your friends ...

:alex :yvesfoaf:knows :tomfoaf:knows

foaf:topic_interest foaf:topic_interest

dbpedia:Ramones dbpedia:Rancid

Social Networking

• ... from any service

:alex :yvesfoaf:knows :tomfoaf:knows

foaf:topic_interest foaf:topic_interest

dbpedia:Ramones dbpedia:Rancid

Using LOD

• You like a band, what about using DBpedia to see if you may like ...

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

Using LOD

• Bands that share concerts with them ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

Using LOD

• Their solo members ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:currentMembers

dbpedia:Adam_Yauch

p:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

Using LOD

• Bands from the same music genre ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:currentMembers

dbpedia:Adam_Yauch

dbpedia:Black_Flag_(band)

dbpedia:Hardcore_Punk

p:genre p:genrep:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

Using LOD

• Or even ... somehow related artists ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:currentMembers

dbpedia:Adam_Yauch dbpedia:B._B._King

dbpedia:Category:American_vegatarians

skos:subject skos:subject

dbpedia:Black_Flag_(band)

dbpedia:Hardcore_Punk

p:genre p:genrep:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

SMC and tagged content

• Tag blog posts using SIOC and MOAT ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

SMC and tagged content

• ... while people tag pictures ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

SMC and tagged content

• ... find related content ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

p:pastMembers

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

SMC and tagged content

• ... once again, everything is distributed

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

p:pastMembers

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

Use cases

Simple recommendation

• Artists that a friend of mine is interested in

• SELECT ?artistWHERE { <$uri> foaf:knows [ foaf:topic_interest ?artist . ] }

Content-based

• SELECT ?track1 ?track2WHERE { <$uri> foaf:topic_interest ?artist . ?artist foaf:made ?track1 . ?track1 mo:similar_to ?track2 .}

• http://dbtune.org/henry

Mixing both

SELECT ?artist2WHERE { <$uri> foaf:knows [ foaf:topic_interest ?artist ] . ?artist a mo:MusicArtist; foaf:made ?track1. ?track1 mo:similar_to ?track2. ?artist2 foaf:made ?track2.}

Event + geolocation

Content-based

Personal music collection

A record I don't yet own

Facet browsing for artist

• http://apassant.net/home/2008/10/musicrec

• DBpedia based• Filtering of relevant properties

Future work• Origin:

• A web resource (the user)‏

• Target:• A web resource (the recommendation)‏

• Problem:• Finding a path between the origin and the

target that goes nearby other “constraints” web resources

• Interests, personal music collection, listening habits, friends, etc.

Thank you ! Any questions ?

http://flickr.com/photos/8049973@N03/2656140464/ by wolf.tone