Multilayer Formats and the Semantic Web: a Music Case Study

The advent of the so-called Semantic Web led to the transformation of the World Wide Web into an environment where documents are associated with data and metadata. The latter kind of information specifies the semantic context of data in a format suitable to be queried and interpreted in an automatic way. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is extensively used in the Semantic Web, since this format supports not only human- but also machine-readable tags. On the one side the Semantic Web aims to create a set of automatically detectable relationships among data, thus providing users with a number of non-trivial paths to navigate information in a geographically distributed framework. On the other side, multilayer formats typically operate in a similar way, but at a "local" level. In this case, information is contained, hierarchically structured and interconnected within a single document. Also in this context XML is extensively adopted. The goal of the present work is to discuss the possibilities emerging from a combined approach, namely by adopting multilayer formats in the Semantic Web, addressing in particular augmented-reality applications. From this point of view, an XML-based international standard known as IEEE 1599 will be employed to show a number of innovative applications in music.