RAMA - Relational Artist MAps

RAMA is a prototype web-based application for visualizing and interacting with networks of music artists. It uses data of roughly 200000 artists and 3 million tags, collected from Last.fm's API. Data includes artists similarities, associated tags and popularity.
RAMA provides two simultaneous layers of information:

1. a graph built from artist similarity data, modeled as a physical system representing nodes as negatively charged particles and edges as springs;
2. overlaid labels containing user-defined tags.

A number of different features aim at providing enhanced browsing experiences to users: RAMA emphasizes commonalities as well as main differences between artists, users can interact with the graph in different ways (changing the graph's initial ramification R, the depth D and how the ramification decays with depth, the population factor P), etc. Optionally, users can edit graphs manually, removing some artists and expanding artist's neighbors.

System requirements

You need JRE 1.5 (or +) installed on your computer to be able to use RAMA.
So far, RAMA has been tested successfully with the following web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Authors

• Diogo Costa
• Luis Sarmento
• Fabien Gouyon

Related papers

• Costa D., Gouyon F., Sarmento L. "RAMA: An Interactive Artist Network Visualization Tool." Late-Breaking Demo Session, International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Kobe, 2009.
• Sarmento L., Gouyon F., Costa B., Oliveira E. "Visualizing Networks of Music Artists with RAMA." International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, Lisbon, 2009.
• Costa B., Gouyon F., Sarmento L. "A Prototype for Visualizing Music Artist Networks." International Conference on Digital Arts, Porto, 2008.

Related Projects / Previous Versions

1. "I Know That Artist" (IKTA)
2. http://pattie.fe.up.pt/RAMA/