June 2011 New DERI Spin Out, Seevl, Reinvents Music Discovery

A spin-out company from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). at NUI Galway is bringing a new experience to music lovers.

Seevl provides new ways to explore the cultural and musical universe of users’ favourite bands and artists, and lets them discover other connected ones, based on a rich set of connections that can exist. The service, free for its users, offers an online discovery user-experience, whether it is by browsing artists, labels or genres, or by combining these features together to find new ones. It also makes its data available to developers that want to build new applications on top of the platform.

Dr Alexandre Passant, CEO and founder of Seevl, which is based in Galway City, Ireland, said: “We want to recreate, online, the music discovery experience that people have when reading records sleeves, trying to know every fact about their favourite artists, or engaging in conversations about the bands they like. To do so, we get data from various sources on the Web to build consolidated artist profiles, so that we can then enable semantic search and explanatory recommendations of related bands. For instance, if you like the Beatles, we will tell you that you may like the Quarrymen as it used to be the former band of most of their members! Combined with the social experience, these features make Seevl a unique music discovery service.”

To enable its platform, Seevl brings together several years of R&D in Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies that have been researched at DERI, which is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established with funding from Science Foundation Ireland. Seevl also partners with OpenLink software to deliver its infrastructure.

Stefan Decker, Director of DERI, said: “This shows that our research can have an impact not only in academia but also in the industrial world, and that DERI is focused on supporting spin out activity from NUI Galway”.

For further information visit the public beta site at http://seevl.net/.