Abstract
In this paper, we describe the Ultima project which aims to construct a platform for evaluating various approaches of music information retrieval. Two kinds of approaches are adopted in this project. These approaches differ in various aspects, such as representations of music objects, index structures, and approximate query processing strategies. For a fair comparison, we propose a measurement of the retrieval effectiveness by recall-precision curves with a scaling factor adjustment. Finally, the performance study of the retrieval effectiveness based on various factors of these approaches is presented.