What technology can the Kendra Initiative use to serve the needs of music listeners, performers and

1
Kendra Semantic Web introduction

• What technology can the Kendra Initiative use to
  serve the needs of music listeners, performers
  and sellers?
• It needs to be simple and pervasive so use the
  World Wide Web to publish the information on the
  Internet
• But the Web is only meaningful to people this
  information needs to be meaningful to computers,
  so they can search and sort automatically

2
How computers are stupid

• Simple English is not good enough it is full of
  complications, and computers are very stupid
• They might think that the sentence Time flies
  like an arrow is a statement about flies
• Or get confused by the fact that a form of
  address for a person is called a title, and so
  is the title of a music track
• But that the title of a track is not the same
  as the title of an album

3
Welcome to the real world

• And its worse than that
• There are multiple sources of information
• Some of them have errors
• Some are misleading or plain wrong
• They will all be in different formats
• Many of them will have extra information, such as
  rights information, that needs to be attached
• And this will be in multiple incompatible
  formats, too

4
Beyond machine-readable information

• One way to solve this problem is for everyone to
  agree to use standard formats for everything, and
  hard-code the understanding into every program.
  But this will take years to resolve.
• What we need is not data that is
  machine-readable, but data that is
  machine-understandable, and let the computers
  sort out the problems for us.
• This is what the Semantic Web is for.

5
Beyond machine-readable information

• Like the Web, the Semantic Web is decentralized
  no-one will own or control it.
• The Semantic Web is meant for machines to read,
  and is complementary to the human-visible Web.
• Its a very new technology, and few people
  understand it yet.
• We think it has great potential, but needs to be
  made easier before it will gain wide acceptance.

6
XML, RDF, Triples

• The Semantic Web uses XML to encode information
  actually a dialect of XML called RDF. It refers
  to (almost) everything as a URI, as if it were an
  object on the Web
• Everything stated in RDF can be stated using
  triples.
• Triples are statements of the form A
  somethings B
• Like Joe is-the-father-of Jane

7
Why bother?

• All of this is intended to let you be very
  precise about things, so that even computers
  wont be confused about it.
• Then (so the idea goes) the computers will be
  able to apply brute-force processing, so you can
  ask for what you want and maybe get it

8
Lets ignore the technical details for now

• The details of all of this are quite technical,
  and dont need to be explained now.
• What you really need to know is this there are
  two sorts of information that need to be
  published
• music catalogues, playlists, and so on
• and the information that says what they mean
• The first job is simply publishing your stuff on
  the Web in RDF format.
• The second job a bit harder but can be made easy
  in practice if people can copy one another.

9
Making the catalogues understandable

• Kendra intends to make it easy to share and
  modify information about catalogues, so the
  community can more quickly get their stuff posted
  on the Web in machine-understandable form.
• One part of this is a Wiki-based piece of
  software designed to make writing the RDF
  descriptions of what your catalogue means much
  easier.
• Another will be providing a forum where people
  can share technical descriptions of their content
  to make it even easier to make your catalogue
  machine-understandable.

10
Making the catalogues understandable

• Other parts of the Kendra project involve plans
  to build experimental search facilities for
  content indexed using the KendraBase software,
  and moving out beyond indexing music to indexing
  other kinds of things.

11
Kendra Semantic Web introduction

• If you build it, they will come.
• We expect Semantic Web support to be built into
  search engines, and we think that it should be a
  part of every media player and Web browser.
• The result of this will be easier access to
  everything.
• We think that Kendra will be part of making this
  happen sooner rather than later.