The Smart Musical Instruments Ontology

The Smart Musical Instruments (SMIs) are an emerging category of musical instruments that belongs to the wider class of Musical Things within the Internet of Musical Things paradigm. SMIs encompass sensors, actuators, embedded intelligence, and wireless connectivity to local networks and to the Internet. Interoperability represents a key issue within this domain, where heterogeneous SMIs are envisioned to exchange information between each other and a plethora of Musical Things. This paper proposes an ontology for the representation of the knowledge related to SMIs, with the aim of facilitating interoperability between SMIs as well as with other Musical Things interacting with them. There was no previous comprehensive data model for the SMIs domain, however the new ontology relates to existing ontologies, including the SOSA Ontology for the representation of sensors and actuators, the Audio Effects Ontology dealing with the description of digital audio effects, and the IoMusT Ontology for the representation Musical Things and IoMusT ecosystems. This paper documents the design of the ontology and its evaluation with respect to specific requirements gathered from an extensive literature review, which was based on scenarios involving SMIs stakeholders, such as performers and studio producers. The SMI Ontology can be accessed at: https://w3id.org/smi#.