Polifonia aims at increasing the amount of knowledge about musical heritage available on the web in a form that is easily accessible both by humans and machines. The project contributes to advance knowledge engineering methodologies and tools, to produce new and align existing music ontologies and knowledge graphs, to produce new music-specific linguistic resources, and to publish and support curation of music contents.
Europe's Musical Heritage Knowledge (MHK) is kept in many places, but they are disconnected (no links) and heterogeneous (sound, texts, scores, all variously transmitted). Scholars, memory institutions, music professionals and artists, and citizens struggle to access and retrieve MHK. Even when they can access and explore it, it is hard to identify relations across music objects, or between MHK and historical or social events.
Polifonia is concerned with explicitly and homogeneously representing MHK, with dense interlinking and public access.
Polifonia has collected stories and use cases that hint at the need for methods and tools for (1) representing orally transmitted heritage and guaranteeing its preservation and transmission, 2) studying large and distributed digital collections of music objects and plurilingual texts, 3) discovering and representing MHK, its links to tangible cultural objects, and to their social, cultural, historical contexts, spanning several centuries and geographic areas.
Polifonia is building an ecosystem of computational methods and tools supporting discovery, extraction, encoding, interlinking, classification, exploration of, and access to, musical heritage knowledge on the Web.
Polifonia releases open source resources, methods, and software, performs dissemination actions for stakeholders and early adopters; increases the engagement of female students in STEM topics through MH-focused laboratories; supports reproducible and customisable artistic digital installation leveraging its technologies and resources; applies its results to ten pilots about preservation, management, studying and interaction with MHK, involving cultural institutes and collection owners, historians of music, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, linguists, etc.
