The HaMSE Ontology: Using Semantic Technologies to support Music Representation Interoperability and Musicological Analysis
This work addresses interoperability and analysis challenges for musicologists, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing semantic technologies in the cultural heritage domain.
The authors tackled the problem of limited and fragmented ontologies for musicological applications by proposing HaMSE, an ontology that supports interoperability between music representation systems and enables music analysis at various granularity levels, addressing long-standing issues in musicological research.
The use of Semantic Technologies - in particular the Semantic Web - has revealed to be a great tool for describing the cultural heritage domain and artistic practices. However, the panorama of ontologies for musicological applications seems to be limited and restricted to specific applications. In this research, we propose HaMSE, an ontology capable of describing musical features that can assist musicological research. More specifically, HaMSE proposes to address sues that have been affecting musicological research for decades: the representation of music and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative data. To do this, HaMSE allows the alignment between different music representation systems and describes a set of musicological features that can allow the music analysis at different granularity levels.