Foafing the Music: Bridging the Semantic Gap in Music Recommendation

In this paper we give an overview of the Foafing the Music system. The system uses the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and RDF Site Summary (RSS) vocabularies for recommending music to a user, depending on the user’s musical tastes and listening habits. Music information (new album releases, podcast sessions, audio from MP3 blogs, related artists’ news and upcoming gigs) is gathered from thousands of RSS feeds. The presented system provides music discovery by means of: user profiling (defined in the user’s FOAF description), context based information (extracted from music related RSS feeds) and content based descriptions (extracted from the audio itself), based on a common ontology (OWL DL) that describes the music domain. The system is available at: http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu