[mb-devel] Collaborative Filtering: Artist - Artist Relationships (Summer of Code Proposal)

[Aaron Cooper]

On 3/22/07, sharon myrtle <sharon.myrtle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
>  I am Sharon Myrtle Paradesi, a senior undergraduate student from India. I'm
> interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code '07 and the topic
> 'Collaborative Filtering: Artist - Artist Relationships' of MetaBrainz
> Foundation particularly interests me.
>
>  Currently, I'm working on Collaborative Filtering Algorithm (specifically
> tailored for Indian Movies) as my Final Year Project (nearly done). The data
> we worked on had the form of user and movie details along with the ratings
> the users gave the movies. We then calculated the correlation between the
> users and recommended movies to new users.
>
> I have formed a basic idea of what the proposal should include.
>
> As far as data sources are concerned, these are the places where we could
> search for relationships between two artists
>
> 1)       Aritist Albums - two artists that are on a compilation together are
> likely to be somewhat similar.
>
> 2)       Search Logs - one user searching for a number of artists also gives
> an indication of similarity.
>
> 3)       Artist Subscription - the artists that MusicBrainz users subscribe
> should also yield some information.
>
> /* the above mentioned are given in the proposal */
>
> 4)       Genres – the artists whose albums belong to similar or same genre
> tend to be musically similar.
>
> 5)       Ratings/Comments of users – scanning the ratings of users to
> various artists and/or comments of users to the albums also provides vital
> information.
>
>  .. etc
>
> I've got the following ideas to collect data and generate artist-artist data
> –
>
> 1)       Scan through all the data sources and write the collected
> information into files (such as artist details, album details, user details
> etc).
>
> 2)       From these files, create and maintain tables of the various artist
> names, and corresponding artists with whom he/she is closely related
> (musically).
>
> 3)       Now we can generate and analyze the relationships between the
> artists.
>
> I'd be glad to hear any comments/suggestions on this. --
> Regards,
> Sharon.

MusicBrainz does not have any information about genres (or custom
tagging), ratings, comments (or discussions about artists/releases),
and only has a very basic subscription tool right now.  I am just
commenting to say that I would love to be able to:
* comment on artists/releases,
* rate albums/songs,
* tag artists/releases/songs, and
* have a more robust subscription tool that suggests more artists to
subscribe to, etc.

[back on topic] Good luck with your proposal, Sharon!

Regards,
-- 
-Aaron