Dissemination
This section points to informative material and initiatives presenting Polifonia achievements.
Publications
ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archives
Title:ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archives
Author:Marilena Daquino, Lucia Giagnolini, Francesca Tomasi
Publication:Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL)
Date:25.11.2021
Proceedings of Linked Archives International Workshop 2021 co-located with 25th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2021).
Semantic Integration of MIR Datasets with the Polifonia Ontology Network
Title:Semantic Integration of MIR Datasets with the Polifonia Ontology Network
Author:Valentina Anita Carriero, Fiorela Ciroku, Jacopo de Berardinis, Delfina Sol Martínez Pandiani, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Andrea Poltronieri, Valentina Presutti.
Publication:International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2021), Late Breaking & Demo session (2021)
Date:01.11.2021
Integration between different data formats, and between data belonging to different collections, is an ongoing challenge in the MIR field. Semantic Web tools have proved to be promising resources for making different types of music information interoperable. However, the use of these technologies has so far been limited and scattered in the field. To address this, the Polifonia project 1
is developing an ontological ecosystem that can cover a wide variety of musical aspects (musical features, instruments, emotions, performances). In this paper, we present the Polifonia Ontology Network, an ecosystem that enables and fosters the transition towards Semantic MIR.
MIDI Representation with Graph Embeddings
Title:MIDI Representation with Graph Embeddings
Author:Pasquale Lisena, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Raphaël Troncy
Publication:International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2021), Late Breaking & Demo session (2021)
Date:01.11.2021
In MIR, feature extraction has been extensively used for learning models of MIDI. We propose an alternative approach that relies on the extraction of latent features from a graph of connected nodes. We show that our MIDI2vec approach has good performance in metadata prediction.
MIDI2vec: Learning MIDI Embeddings for Reliable Prediction of Symbolic Music Metadata
Title:MIDI2vec: Learning MIDI Embeddings for Reliable Prediction of Symbolic Music Metadata
Author:Pasquale Lisena, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Raphaël Troncy
Publication:IOS Press (2021)
Date:01.09.2021
An important problem in large symbolic music collections is the low availability of high-quality metadata, which is essential for various information retrieval tasks. Traditionally, systems have addressed this by relying either on costly human annotations or on rule-based systems at a limited scale. Recently, embedding strategies have been exploited for representing latent factors in graphs of connected nodes. In this work, we propose MIDI2vec, a new approach for representing MIDI files as vectors based on graph embedding techniques. Our strategy consists of representing the MIDI data as a graph, including the information about tempo, time signature, programs and notes. Next, we run and optimise node2vec for generating embeddings using random walks in the graph. We demonstrate that the resulting vectors can successfully be employed for predicting the musical genre and other metadata such as the composer, the instrument or the movement. In particular, we conduct experiments using those vectors as input to a Feed-Forward Neural Network and we report good comparable accuracy scores in the prediction with respect to other approaches relying purely on symbolic music, avoiding feature engineering and producing highly scalable and reusable
models with low dimensionality. Our proposal has real-world applications in automated metadata tagging for symbolic music, for example in digital libraries for musicology, datasets for machine learning, and knowledge graph completion.
Integrating citizen experiences in cultural heritage archives: requirements, state of the art, and challenges
Title:Integrating citizen experiences in cultural heritage archives: requirements, state of the art, and challenges
Author:Daga, Enrico; Asprino, Luigi; Damiano, Rossana; Daquino, Marilena; Diaz Agudo, Belen; Gangemi, Aldo; Kuflik, Tsvi; Lieto, Antonio; Marras, Anna Maria; Martinez Pandiani, Delfina; Mulholland, Paul; Peroni, Silvio; Pescarin, Sofia; Wecker, Alan.
Publication:ACM JOCCH (2021)
Date:01.01.2021
Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors’ experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts, to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE – Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement – as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people’s responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them.
We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature towards a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation, and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.
The Polifonia portal: a confluence of user stories, research pilots, data management and knowledge graph technology
Title:The Polifonia portal: a confluence of user stories, research pilots, data management and knowledge graph technology
Author:Scharnhorst Andrea, Admiraal Femmy, van Kranenburg Peter, Guillotel-Nothmann Christophe, Mulholland Paul
Publication:DARIAH Annual event
Date:07.09.2021
This paper takes as an example the envisioned portal of the newly started Polifonia project that interlinks resources from very rich, old, established archives while making optimal use of the latest semantic web technologies. In the project, ten research pilots, spanning from historical bells and organ heritage, classification of polyphonic notated music, to the historical role of music in children’s lives, form the driving force behind the development of the dedicated interface.
Sequential Linked Data: the State of Affairs
Title:Sequential Linked Data: the State of Affairs
Author:Enrico Daga, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Enrico Motta
Publication:Semantic Web–Interoperability, Usability, Applicability (2021): In-press.
Date:21.07.2021
Software and data for the experiments in “Sequential Linked Data: the state of affairs”
Facade-X: an Opinionated Approach to SPARQL Anything
Title:Facade-X: an Opinionated Approach to SPARQL Anything
Author:Enrico Daga, Luigi Asprino, Paul Mulholland, Aldo Gangemi
Publication:SEMANTICS 2021, Amsterdam, September 2021. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.02361 (2021).
Date:21.07.2021
SPARQL-Anything/sparql.anything
Talks and presentations

The Polifonia portal: a confluence of user stories, research pilots, data management and knowledge graph technology
Conference Paper presentation by Scharnhorst, Andrea, Admiraal, Femmy, van Kranenburg, Peter, Guillotel-Nothmann, Christophe, & Mulholland, Paul at DARIAH Annual event 2021, Interfaces

Semantic Integration of MIR Datasets with the Polifonia Ontology Network
Conference Paper presentation by Valentina Anita Carriero, Fiorela Ciroku, Jacopo de Berardinis, Delfina Sol Martínez Pandiani, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Andrea Poltronieri, Valentina Presutti at ISMIR 2021
Find the event website here.

MIDI Representation with Graph Embeddings
Conference Paper presentation by Pasquale Lisena, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Raphaël Troncy at ISMIR 2021
Find the event website here.

Demo Research: Polifonia
Polifonia presented its first demo research at the Sonar AI Music and Festival (27.28 October 2021) in Barcelona.