Re: [help-GIFT] Extensions to MRML, web page bugs and other comments

[Wolfgang Müller]

On Wednesday 20 August 2003 20:05, Reiss. Dr J wrote:
> Hi,
Hi, 
thanks for posting here. 
> I work with music information retrieval (MIR) and there has been a lot of
> debate recently on how to benchmark MIR systems. See the Evaluation Project
> on www.music-ir.org for background info, and specifically [1] for how it
> relates to MRML. Most of the MIR community would like to see a TREC-like
> evaluation. It seems that the best way for us to do this (without TREC
> support) is following the example of Benchathlon. To do this, I would need
> to thoroughly understand MRML and implement it and extend it to support
> musical queries (query-by-humming systems, symbolic as well as audio data,
> monophonic and polyphonic similarity, ...). So I'm mainly seeking advice
> from those involved with MRML. I've read the documentation but its not
> obvious what to do. I've also tried working with some of the online
> demonstrations and related software resources but I've had problems with
> all of them. For instance,

> 1. According to the MRML website, the main MRML resource, libMRML, is
> supposedly on the GIFT page, http://www.gnu.org/software/gift/
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/gift/>  . But on that page, under “Downloading
> the GIFT” it states “The latest version can be downloaded at
> http://www.mrml.net” !
This is a bug. Removed. Since I left Geneva, gnu.org is the main download 
location, and I would really suggest going over CVS at the current state.

> I then found the GIFT package on a different page,
> but the documentation on libMRML, and how to use it outside of GIFT, is
> very sparse.

Yes. Did you get my of-line mail of yesterday?

> 2. The jMRML, http://mptc.eng.cmu.ac.th:8080/mrml/gift.jsp
> <http://mptc.eng.cmu.ac.th:8080/mrml/gift.jsp>  , page does not seem to be
> working.

Pruet's web page seems to be very slow, but he maintains it AFAIK.

> 3. fer-de-lance has a software depository with no files and only a handful
> of two year old messages in the mailing list.

Thanks for kicking me. FdL is more or less discontinued. I cannot work on 
extending the GIFT towards FdL's goals, as I am quite taken by my job, and my 
job's focus has moved away from that topic :-(. The software developed in 
FdL, the kmrml MRML client is now part of KDE in the package kdegraphics. 
[BTW:This is quite a lot what was intended to do: providing a forum for 
people who want to integrate retrieval into the desktop who do that 
integratin within their own projects (i.e. KDE/GNOME/GIFT/...). ] I will 
update the site ASAP.

> 4. The php client has the image loading facility disabled and hence does
> nothing http://viper.unige.ch/demo/php/demo.php
> <http://viper.unige.ch/demo/php/demo.php>

Wrong. You can try out viper by using random images from the collection 
queried. The only thing disabled is using images outside a given collection C 
for querying C. This was disabled, after discovering that we did not like the 
images typically chosen as examples. 

Log in, click on the "random" button, and you will get some images that you 
can use as query images.

>
> 5. Also, many of the viper links, such as http://viper.unige.ch/info.html
> <http://viper.unige.ch/info.html> , are dead.
>
I guess Steph will be thankful for this bug report.
>
> So I guess my questions are as follows: whats the best way for me to get up
> to speed on MRML quickly? How should I augment it to support musical
> queries? Is there an MRML tutorial (this would be quite different from the
> specification document)? Is this the right approach? Would anyone be
> interested in collaborating on this ;) ?
>
OK. Regarding the software part, I paste you the essentials of the message I 
sent to you off-line yesterday. Mail is slow these days...

<quote>

Henning is right, libMRML is very much coupled with the GIFT, it is to quite 
an extent the center of GIFT. So one possibility for you would be downloading 
the GIFT, install it and then try to make your own GIFT plugin. This is 
described in a terse manner in the GIFT documentation. help-GIFT is your 
friend.

Another possibility would be trying to download and install the benchathlon 
starter kit or better the gift-prerequisites package (which is a superset of 
the PERLs in the benchathlon starter kit). 

In there there is a tool that adapts command line retrieval program to MRML. 
This tool was written for Internet Imaging 2002 (january 2002), but due to 
firewall problems of our one and only testing person it never made it into 
public (well, the code is public, but few people used it). 

That is, you tell the tool (in a config file) which parameters your retrieval 
program expects, and my tool will call your program on each MRML query sent 
to my tool. There is no such thing as session management in there, i.e. every 
user will see the same configuration, but the MRML spoken by my tool is 
correct. 

I have not looked at that code since 2002, but I am quite sure that using some 
mails exchange we could make this work for you in finite time (objectively 
and subjectively :-) finite time) .

<unquote>

This offer holds. 

Cheers,
Wolfgang