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

[Henning Müller]

Hi,

indeed, there is not as much (easy-to-read) information on MRML 
available as we would like. Still, the best resource is definitely the 
mrml page http://www.mrml.net/
This page should give you quite a few links and descriptions of the 
current mrml version and about what is planned.
The page http://www.mrml.net/specification/v1_0/index.html is not a 
perfect tutorial but should give you some information on what mrml 
currently does.
http://www.mrml.net/specification/v2_0/index.html contains some ideas 
for a new version of mrml. I think it would be good if we can work 
together on integrating musical retrieval into mrml for such a version 2.0.

jmrml should be accessible, I do not know why it was down. Pruet, can 
you help us on that?

http://www.gnu.org/software/gift/ contains packaged versions of gift 
whereas the newest version can be obtained from savannah cvs: 
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gift/
I think that the phrase at the gnu web side that the latest versions of 
gift are on the mrml web side should be removed, also to better separate 
gift and mrml.

The php interface was down lately as we reinstalled the server but it 
should be up and working again http://viper.unige.ch/demo/php/demo.php
The phrase that you cannot upload images does not prevent you from doing 
queries with images from the database. Just type random and then select 
an image as example.
We have image uploading disabled in the public version because we had a 
lot of more or less illegal images being uploaded to us.
When you install the interface and server on your computer, you can 
surely enable uploading images.

There also is a Java interface Charmer with communication in mrml that 
should be available from the viper server 
http://viper.unige.ch/research/GIFT/Charmer-0.2b.tgz. I will see that we 
correct the link that is on the viper pages.
There is also kmrml as a package of kde, a plugin for Konqueror 
(http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdegraphics/kmrml/).

I know, there is no real easy to use tutorial on mrml but there are a 
lot of resources that should help you and for questions you can always 
go to this list or contact us directly.
The activity on mrml has been a bit scattered as of lately.

Have you tried to install gift on a linux machine plus the php interface.
Gift stores the messages send and received in a log file in mrml format 
and this might be the easiest way to see what is going on. I can send 
you some parts of a logfile if you have problems installing gift.

I think that for music retrieval you can use a similar mechanism to 
connect to a server as gift/mrml does but then how are queries 
formulated? Do you send an example file? Do you specify whether it is 
part of a song or a complete sond, whether it is hummed or not? Do you 
use URLs to identify files in a database?
Maybe we can try to put all the information together that you think is 
necessary for a server to execute a query and then what you would expect 
the server to send as a reply, including all options.
With that we should be able to define a minimum mrml-compatible 
communication.

I hope this helps a bit. I would really like you to use mrml for a music 
retrieval benchmark, also to get more activity on mrml and maybe get 
help to work on a new version mrml 2.0. Surely, we can collaborate on 
that to make mrml a real multimedia retrieval protocol and not only for 
image retrieval.

Cheers, Henning


Reiss. Dr J wrote:

> Hi,
> 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” ! 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.
>
> 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. 
>
> 3. fer-de-lance has a software depository with no files and only a handful of 
> two year old messages in the mailing list.
>
> 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> 
>
> 5. Also, many of the viper links, such as http://viper.unige.ch/info.html 
> <http://viper.unige.ch/info.html> , are dead.
>
>
>
> 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 ;) ?
>
>
>
> [1] Reiss, J.D. and M. Sandler. MIR Benchmarking: Lessons Learned from the Multimedia Community. in The 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference. 2003. Toronto, Canada. 
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Joshua D. Reiss
>
> Lecturer
>
> Office 0207-882-5528
>
> Fax 0207-882-7997 
>
> Dept of Electronic Engineering
>
> Queen Mary, University of London
>
> Mile End Road, London E14NS 
>
> United Kingdom
>
> Email address@hidden
>
> WWW www2.elec.qmul.ac.uk/~josh 
>
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--
---------------------------------------
Dr. Henning Müller
University Hospitals of Geneva
Division of Medical Informatics
21, rue Micheli-du-Crest
CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
Tel  +41 22 372-6175
Fax  +41 22 372-8680
email address@hidden