The Musician’s Context Ontology: Modeling the context for smart musical applications

The paradigm of context-aware computing allows storing situational and environmental information in such a way that its interpretation can be done easily and more meaningfully. In turn, this understanding is used to anticipate users’ needs, and proactively provide them with situation-aware content and experiences. Whereas context-awareness has been investigated extensively in the computer science and IoT disciplines, it has been largely overlooked by the research community dealing with musical interfaces design. Existing musical instruments are not equipped with the ability to understand the context around them, namely who is the musician playing them, what musical activity is being conducted, as well as where and when. Enhancing musical instruments with context-awareness has the concrete potential to enable novel kinds of interactions between musicians and musical content in a large variety of situations, from playing alone to playing in a group, from music learning to music composition. To accomplish such a vision of intelligence embedded in musical instruments it is necessary to model the context around their users. In this paper, we present an ontology devised to represent the knowledge related to musicians and musical activities, the “Musician’s Context Ontology” (MUSICO) to facilitate the development of context-aware musical applications. There was no previous comprehensive data model for the domain of musicians’ context, nevertheless, the new ontology relates to several existing ontologies, including the Internet of Musical Things Ontology to represent Internet of Musical Things ecosystems and the Music Ontology that deals with the description of the music value-chain from production to consumption. This paper documents the design of the ontology and its evaluation with respect to specific requirements gathered from an extensive literature review and interviews with musicians. The utility of the ontology is demonstrated by a smartphone application that enables to search for musicians based on both textual and content-based musical queries. MUSICO can be accessed at: https://w3id.org/musico#.