Smart Musical Instruments preset sharing: An ontology-based data access approach

Interoperability represents an important aspect in research dealing with the emerging class of smart musical instruments (SMIs). To date, no interoperable file format for the exchange of content produced by heterogeneous SMIs has been defined yet. This paper proposes a solution to the issue of sharing presets among heterogeneous SMIs, which are used to conFigure an SMI. The heterogeneity of SMIs may come from the type, structure and implementation of the SMI's embedded system, its sound engine and sensor interface. The presented solution is based on the 'ontology-based data access' paradigm and leverages the existing Smart Musical Instruments Ontology. This approach allows one to share presets between heterogeneous SMIs by mapping information about the configuration of an instrument to the concepts of the ontology. Thanks to this approach, SMIs developers can implement programs that convert proprietary formats for the configuration of the instrument into a common format for SMIs, and vice versa. We present the general architecture and workflow of this approach, and we describe an implementation for it which involves the sharing of presets among two heterogeneous smart guitars.