D2.2: Ontologies and knowledge graphs of music objects, patterns, and software package – 2nd version (V1.0) DRAFT
Creators: name: de Berardinis, Jacopo
name: Meroño-Peñuela, Albert
name: Jain, Nitisha
name: Poltronieri, Andrea
name: Lazzari, Nicolas
name: Carriero, Valentina Anita
name: Presutti, Valentina
name: Graciotti, Arianna
name: Marzi, Eleonora
name: Wigham, Mari
name: Van Kranenburg, Peter
name: Rigaux, Philippe
name: Morales Tirado, Alba
name: Gurrieri, Marco
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: The landscape of music ontologies to represent music metadata, content, and contextual information has seen several contributions in recent years, both in the audio and symbolic domains. Ontologies are necessary to generate semantically rich Music Knowledge Graphs that can describe the complexity and the diversity of music across different perspectives and domains, to serve various applications in information retrieval, digital humanities. Together with the ability to connect different sources of music data, this brings several benefits – from preserving our musical heritage on the Web to enabling scholars to discover new knowledge, such as unknown relations (influences, similarities), contributing novel methodologies for computational analyses, and completing missing artefacts (e.g. an unfinished composition). To achieve this vision – which is central to Polifonia, it is necessary that music ontologies can cover a diversified range of requirements, while potentially supporting future demands as extensions, and enabling their interoperability in a modular fashion (e.g. seamlessly using 2 or more ontologies). However, the requirements and context of the Polifonia project, in addition to evidence collected through systematic surverys, demonstrated that current music ontologies lack interoperability, and are insufficient for representing music history and the cultural heritage context in which it was generated. Not only does this hampers the aforementioned vision, but also risks the propagation of recency and cultural biases to downstream applications. To address this challenge and lay down the basis to the Music Web vision, this deliverable presents the first stable version of the Polifonia Ontology Network (PON) – a collection of ontologies for music cultural heritage, centred around four foundational modules: Music Meta (metadata), Representation (content), Source (provenance) and Instrument (cultural objects). We designed PON with a strong accent on cultural stakeholder requirements, collected from user stories and formulated as competency questions (CQs). Given the high number of stakeholders and the heterogeneity in domain expertise, we also contributed a toolkit using Language Models to support knowledge engineers in generating, validating, and analysing CQs. Following the application of our toolkit on Polifonia’s requirements, we also release our high-quality competency questions in the PolifoniaCQ dataset.This deliverable also reports current and future use of these resources by our internal project pilots, early adopters in the music industry and cultural heritage sectors, and opportunities for the Semantic Web and Music Information Retrieval communities. In addition, we provide an overview of how PON is being used in Polifonia, the Knowledge Graphs that have been developed so far, and our plans for future extensions and integration. The deliverable concludes with a use case showing how PON can support contributions in computational creativity, and enable novel workflows and pipelines for the exploration of chord datasets.From our pilots, we highlight the ChoCo and Harmory knowledge graphs from INTERLINK, using our ontologies to integrate harmonic data from various datasets, semantically describing their content, similarity, and structural segmentation. Synergies across pilots have enabled the reuse of INTERLINK technologies in the ACCESS pilot (mapping harmony to haptic signals for hearing-impaired listeners), as well as ontological and software support for the TUNES pilot (modelling melodic patterns). In parallel, our ontologies encoding music theories are enabling the formal analysis of symbolic music in the TONALITIES pilot, providing complementary interpretations for the identification of cadences in a fully explainable way. PON’s coverage of contextual music knowledge is also contributing to the semantic description of musical instruments, starting from their general and abstract properties (materials, builders, locations, maintenance, etc.) and specialising into ORGANS and BELLS for the respective pilots. Finally, a central module of PON – the Music Meta ontology, is being used across all pilots in Polifonia, and is now under evaluation and extension for potential reuse by our music industry and cultural heritage partners (Polifonia Stakeholder Network). Notably, while addressing Polifonia requirements in alignment with other relevant contributions (Music Ontology, DOREMUS, Wikidata), Music Meta is opening up new opportunities to address issues related to metadata attribution and copyright management.