Editorial Metadata in Electronic Music Distribution Systems: Between Universalism and Isolationism

Abstract

We address the problem of metadata management in the context of future Electronic Music Distribution (EMD) systems, and propose a classification of existing musical editorial systems in two categories: the isolationists and the universalists. Universalists propose shared information at the expense of consensuality, while isolationist approaches allow individual parameterization at the expense of the lack of reusability. We propose an architecture and a system for managing editorial metadata that lies in the middle of these two extremes: we organize musical editorial information in such a way that users can benefit from shared metadata when they wish, while also allowing them to create and manage a private version of editorial information. A mechanism allows the synchronizing of both views: the shared and the private.

Acknowledgements

The Music Browser project originated and has been conducted inside Sony Computer Science Laboratories in the context of the Cuidado and SemanticHifi IST projects. The Cuidado project (Sarwar et al., 2001), entitled “Content-based Unified Interfaces and Descriptions for Audio/Music Databases available Online”, ran from January 2001 to December 2003. The project is currently being continued in the context of the SemanticHifi project (Vinet et al., 2002) started in December 2003.