Upcoming talks and travels

I'm going to be up to a number of things that may be of interest to the readers of this (rather sparse) blog.

Quick summary

• Co-chairing The Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery (WOMRAD) Oct 23rd, Chicago
• Presenting some new Musicmetric API features during ISMIR, Oct 24-28 (demo on the 28th), Miami
• Giving a talk about beer and critical tasting at Ignite London 5, Nov 8th, London

WOMRAD

Our workshop (other co-chairs are Amélie Anglade, Òscar Celma, Paul Lamere, and Brian McFee) will cover a diverse array of approaches and angles for music recommendation and discovery. The workshop is runs the full and is part of RecSys 2011, though I sadly can't stay for most of the conference aside from our workshop (see below). It should prove to be an interesting day of research. Are you planning on attending? Let us know.

ISMIR

I'll be dashing off from Chicago to Miami to attend ISMIR, and to present some new (not-yet-released) API features from Musicmetric. While things aren't quite live yet, I can say that in addition to our artist based endpoints, we'll be offering track-based endpoints soon as well, and aligning them with an I-bet-you-can-guess-which large public audio feature test set. More detail on this one to come.

Ignite London 5

Ignite is a series of lightning talks that have taken place in cities all over the world, unified not by a common theme, but a common format: all talks last five minutes, contain 20 slides, and the slides are automatically advanced every 15 seconds. The matching ethos of this structure is perhaps best seen in the Ignite slogan, "Enlighten us, but make it quick." I'll be speaking about beer, style and critical tasting in a talk titled "Ale or Lager and Other False Choices." Here's a brief description:

In a word, my talk is about beer. In a few more words, the driving narrative behind the talk is a crash course in beer styles and more generally, critical tasting. After an extraordinarily brief description of beer, broad ideas of style and the critical tasting process, the core of the talk will be made up of live lightning tastes of commercial examples of various styles of beer (one slide per style, 12 styles covered with one commercial example each). For coherence these tasting slides will grouped into broader styles, with aim toward width, rather than depth of coverage. The styles will be approximately based on those from the BJCP and the Brewer's Association.

I still haven't sorted out the exact spread of beers or how they will be grouped, though I'm leaning toward something simple and obviously ingredient tied (something like -- Lagers, ales:yeast driven, ales:malt forward, ales:hop heavy, with 3 beers each from a different recognized style in each). If anyone has any thoughts about style divisions or specific examples do let me know. If you'd like to go to ignite (and you know you would) the tickets will be available over this way later this week.

So, lots of things going on. Plus there's this other thing I've been working on.

Right, back to it.

Free Beer: A Plea for Open Data [About Beer]

(I wrote most of this right after my viva, but got a bit sidetracked...)

Hey look, my first blog post about beer (or at least beer metadata).

So yesterday a few weeks ago, Tim Cowlishaw (@mistertim ) stated this on twitter:

To which I replied with this :

(Scraping is a way to get the info a human reads, say on a website into a format a computer program can read. More on why I'd want to do that in a minute...)

Which was followed by what I thought was a reasonable request:

Now at this point I had figured that was the end of it. Both rate beer or beer advocate ignored my requests for data a year or so ago, I was expecting the same this time. However, beer advocate responded via twitter:

(Note that the link to the tweet no longer resolves, because beeradvocate decided to delete this tweet a couple hours later. The screen capture was taken from my twitter client just after the deletion...)

Now, I hadn't been prepared for such knee-jerk nastiness regarding seemingly reasonable data requests and neither had Tim as he quickly push out this series of messages:

While I and others pushed some similar responses, Tim's summarize things really well: boo, disdain, technical critique. (after this both Tim and I appeared to be blocked from following beeradvocate...)

The crux of all this is that I (and it would appear others, but from here I speak only for myself) would love to have access to structured data (as a service or, better yet, as documents) about beer and the people who drink it.

I'd love to build browser-based applications that do cross-domain recommendation of say beer and music. But in order to do that I'd need data about people's taste, in beer and music. Lots of options to work with in the music domain. But beer? Machine readable beer data is harder to find.

Both ratebeer and beer advocate have a great deal of this data, it's just not (openly) machine readable. In ratebeer's case this is entirely crowdsourced and for beer advocate this is true for their community pages. There's a compelling case that crowdsourced data should be as open as possible, given that the data itself comes from the public at large. But beyond the moral case, opening your data means that the wide-world of evening and weekend software developers/architects/designers/whatevers (many have the same job during the day) will expand what is possible a site's data in a way that will benefit said site (like my half baked idea above). This, in essence, is the commercial argument for supporting open data and has been shown to be extremely effective in other domains (say, to pick one at random, music). And there is a simply massive spread of open data apis (again, both service and document) but barely any covering data about my favourite topic that isn't music, beer. So what do you say ratebeer or beeradvocate? How about some nice strucutured data?

note: I should mention that there are a couple sites that are beer related and open: untappd and beerspotr. Both are good sites, though neither is quite to the point of hitting critical mass in terms of data coverage and usefulness just yet. Either might at some point in the future, but ratebeer and beeradvocate already have, the data just isn't accessable.