Véronique Sébastien

An Ontology for Musical Performances Analysis: Application to a Collaborative Platform Dedicated to Instrumental Practice

Performance analysis is a common issue in the musical field, especially for instrument teachers and musicologists. That is why we present in this paper an ontology (technical aspect) and a descriptive model (pragmatic aspect) to allow music teachers and students to create semantic annotation on musical performances. As such, we start by studying recorded piano lessons and analyze the required concepts and roles. We then propose a general performance description model based on these lessons and detail how musicology rules can be used to automatically infer new information on a given piece. Lastly, we discuss the integration of our work to an e-learning web-based collaborative platform for musical education.

From knowledge transmission to sign sharing: semiotic web as a new paradigm for teaching and learning in the future internet

In the 21st century, with the advent of ultra high-speed broadband networks (1Gb per second), the Internet will offer new opportunities for innovators to design qualitative services and applications. Indeed, the challenge of such e-services is not only on the technological aspects of Internet with new infrastructures and architectures to conceive. The reality is also on its human and multimedia content delivery, with innovative philosophies of communication to apply in this digital and virtual age. In the context of Teaching and Learning as a human-centered design approach, we propose a new paradigm for thinking the Web, called the Web of Signs, rather than the Web of things. It focuses on the process of making knowledge by sharing signs and significations (Semiotic Web), more than on knowledge transmission with intelligent object representations (Semantic Web). Sign management is the shift of paradigm for education with ICT (e-Education) that we have investigated in such domains as enhancing natural and cultural heritage. In this paper, we will present this concept and illustrate it with two examples issued from La Reunion Island projects in instrumental e-Learning (@-MUSE) and biodiversity informatics (IKBS). This Sign management method was experimented in the frame of our Living Lab in Teaching and Learning at University of Reunion Island.

Sign Management for the Future of e-Education: Examples of Collaborative e-Services in a Living Lab (Invited Paper)

From a European technological and industrial perspective of the 20th century, Knowledge Management (KM) was viewed as the next step towards reaching a smart knowledge-based economy. But today, in the 21th century of big data and fast moving information, we argue that KM is not enough for reaching a qualitative human-based post-industrial society. We need a broader view in order to understand user needs and respond to their personal desires. In this endeavor, Living labs are a good way to reposition creative people at the center of technologies. But we need also methodologies and tools to accompany the transition from a competitive economy to a more sustainable society. We experimented this move at University of Reunion Island in the domain of e-education. We conceived a new paradigm called Sign Management (SM) for enhancing content producers with multimedia tools on a Creativity Platform. A methodology for co-designing educational e-services was applied in both natural (biodiversity) and cultural (music) domains in order that linear knowledge transmission lets place to an iterative know-how sharing approach between teachers and learners. This sign-based methodology serves as a condition for opening the era of Semiotic Web (Web of Signs) over Semantic Web (Web of Things). The objective is to co-create qualitative educational e-services with people based on a more natural/artificial and intelligent approach in the frame of Living labs.

From knowledge to sign management on a Creativity Platform

In the field of E-learning, the goal of researchers in knowledge acquisition and transmission is to produce e-services that are genuinely useful, that is to say, perfectly adapted to their end-uses. Here, we will deal with the specificities of learning how to play a musical instrument for which the quality of learning depends on the quality of teaching methods. In this context, semantic management of tacit and explicit knowledge from experts and books is not enough. Knowledge engineers must also capture live interpretations of expert musicians to illustrate the lesson to be learned. To enhance these significations, Sign management is a concept that has more relevance than Knowledge management: it aims at indexing multimedia contents (i.e. annotations) on different on/off-line supports with formalized textual information (i.e. scores) in order to better share interpretations and viewpoints. In this paper, we explain our concept of Sign management in the new digital and relational ecosystem. We then describe an iterative method based on a Creativity Platform that establishes end-uses as the criterion by which e-services are developed. The Creativity Platform serves to better understand the transformation of a given tool (proposed offer) into an instrument (motivated demand), which, in turn, motivates the supply that is produced to meet the demand. We illustrate our method based on activity theory by using an example of instrumental e-learning, the e-guitar project. Finally, we discuss the pragmatic results of our co-design experience with end-users.

From Knowledge to Sign Management: A Co-design Methodology for Biodiversity and Music Enhancement

When using Artificial Intelligence techniques for Knowledge management in decision support systems, the enhancement of knowledge should be based both on artificial machine learning methods and a natural human learning approach. Indeed, knowledge representation with ontologies and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is not enough for gaining qualitative results in decision support systems. We need to manage know-how, i.e. living knowledge. For example, enhancing biodiversity and music means teaching and learning the effectiveness of individual and living interpretations (how to observe a natural specimen, how to play a music sheet). The quality of descriptions is thus very important to correctly classify or identify marine or terrestrial organisms, or learn adequately an instrument such as the guitar or the piano. This paper introduces Sign management to tackle this qualitative learning problem in AI. Then, a Co-design methodology and a cooking method on a Creativity Platform are proposed: when dealing with such complex domains, we need to focus on the signification of knowledge construction that operates in co-designing an e-service that should be useful for reaching a more robust knowledge base. Our finding is that due to different interpretations of domain objects from subjects (persons), we need sign bases to move from written expert knowledge transmission to multimedia know-how sharing in the community for getting better results.