Five Approaches to Collecting Tags for Music
Now that the proceedings for ISMIR 2008 are online, I am reading papers that are on topics that interest me. Today I read the paper Five Approaches to Collecting Tags for Music by Douglas Turnbull, Luke Barrington and Gert Lanckriet. In this paper, Doug and company compare five approaches to collecting tags for music: surveys, web mining, harvesting social tags, autotags and games. The paper presents a well-balanced and complete overview of how tags for music can be collected. They describe some of the issues with each of the methods. Now I don't always agree with some of their characterizations about the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches which means we'll be able to have some interesting conversations in Philly in a couple of weeks. One topic for discussion: I'd like to get a better understanding of the difference between tags collected in a social context (such as those collected at Last.fm) and those collected in a gaming context.
All in all, this is a good paper If you are interested in
tags and music information retrieval, this paper should be on your short
list.