A music information system automatically generated via Web content mining techniques

0306-4573/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2010.09.002 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +43 (0) 732 2468 1 E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Sched 1 In the following, we use the term ‘‘artist” to refe This article deals with the problem ofminingmusic-related information from theWeb and representing this information via amusic information system. Novel techniques have been developed as well as existing ones refined in order to automatically gather information about music artists and bands. After searching, retrieval, and indexing of Web pages that are related to a music artist or band, Web content mining and music information retrieval techniques were applied to capture the following categories of information: similarities between music artists or bands, prototypicality of an artist or a band for a genre, descriptive properties of an artist or a band, band members and instrumentation, images of album cover artwork. Approaches to extracting these pieces of information are presented and evaluation experiments are described that investigate the proposed approaches’ performance. From the insights gained by the various experiments an Automatically Generated Music Information System (AGMIS) providing Web-based access to the extracted information has been developed. AGMIS demonstrates the feasibility of automated music information systems on a large collection of more than 600,000 music artists. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.