COMUS: Ontological and Rule-Based Reasoning for Music Recommendation System

In this paper, we propose Context-based Music Recommendation (COMUS) ontology for modeling user's musical preferences and context for supporting reasoning about the user's desired emotion and preferences. The COMUS provides an upper Music Ontology that captures concepts about the general properties of music such as title, artists and genre and also provides extensibility for adding domain-specific ontologies, such as Music Feature, Mood and Situation, in a hierarchical manner. The COMUS is music dedicated ontology in OWL constructed by incorporating domain specific classes for music recommendation into the Music Ontology. Using this context ontology, we believe that the use of logical reasoning rules by checking the consistency of context information, and reasoning over the high-level, implicit context from the low-level, explicit information. As a novelty, our ontology can express detailed and complicated relations among the music, moods and situations, enabling users to find appropriate music for the application. We present some of the experiments we performed as a case-study for music recommendation.