Dirk Waldik: Social mapping-Flash/Web 2.0

Social mapping–Flash/Web 2.0 - Held by Dirk Waldik
31th March 2006

musiCompass focuses on the world of music.

Music is one of the best ways to express emotions and moods as a performer as well as a listener.
Music has been, and continues to be at the centres of society. Artists create styles of music, people listen to them and develop identifications; collecting music, creating play lists and developing a unique music taste are trends of the time.

musiCompass aims to bring people, artists and music together in a visual and interactive environment.

Concept
Based on the idea that there are patterns in tastes and that tastes are not distributed uniformly,
musiCompass uses collaborative filtering on profiled music data.
Each person is represented by their music profile, a computer-readable representation of their listening habits.
So far data has been collected from around 60.000 users, totalling over 100 million listened songs.
musiCompass visualizes resulting connections between people and artists through mapping.

People
A neighbourhood of people with similar music taste is generated for each listener. An algorithm that compares individual profiles on song level calculates this neighbourhood. Fans of a certain artist represent people with a high interest in this artist and can be used as reference point to find similar artists.

Artists
A similarity calculation based on the people’s music profile generates connections between similar artists. "People who have listened to these artists have also listened to those artists" is the underlying principle.
This network is presented in the music map. Connections between artists and people generate dynamic fields of tastes.