Knowledge representation issues in musical instrument ontology design

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary work on musical instruments ontology design, and investigates heterogeneity and limitations in existing instrument classification schemes. Numerous research to date aims at representing information about musical instruments. The works we examined are based on the well known Hornbostel and Sach's classification scheme. We developed representations using the Ontology Web Language (OWL), and compared terminological and conceptual heterogeneity using SPARQL queries. We found evidence to support that traditional designs based on taxonomy trees lead to ill-defined knowledge representation, especially in the context of an ontology for the Semantic Web. In order to overcome this issue, it is desirable to have an instrument ontology that exhibits a semantically rich structure. © 2011 International Society for Music Information Retrieval.