A spin-out company from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway called Seevl has developed a new online discovery user experience for music lovers.
Seevl provides new ways to explore the cultural and musical universe of users’ favourite bands and artists, and lets them discover other connected ones, based on a rich set of connections that can exist.
The service, free for its users, allows them to browse artists, labels or genres, as well as combining these features together to find new ones. It also makes its data available to developers that want to build new applications on top of the platform.
“We want to recreate, online, the music discovery experience that people have when reading record sleeves, trying to know every fact about their favourite artists, or engaging in conversations about the bands they like,” said Dr Alexandre Passant, CEO and founder of Seevl.
“To do so, we get data from various sources on the web to build consolidated artist profiles, so that we can then enable semantic search and explanatory recommendations of related bands. For instance, if you like the Beatles, we will tell you that you may like the Quarrymen, as it used to be the former band of most of their members. Combined with the social experience, these features make Seevl a unique music-discovery service.”
To enable its platform, Seevl brings together several years of research and development in semantic web and linked data technologies that have been researched at DERI, which is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established with funding from Science Foundation Ireland. Seevl also partners with OpenLink software to deliver its infrastructure.
