When two or more data sources (e.g., Wikipedia and
MusicBrainz) have an entry about the same entity (e.g., Camaron, the flamenco singer), but those entries are identified with different labels according to the source (e.g., Camaron, Camaron de la Isla, or Jesus Lopez Monje), how can our system automatically determine if they refer to the same artist?
Far from presenting only the theoretical, the symposium participants also discussed in detail the practical details of releasing large data sets, as demonstrated by the invited talk of Robert Kaye (
MusicBrainz) on how he helped release the world's music knowledge.
MusicBrainz is a powerful relational database of music metadata.
As one of the two remaining open source projects created in direct response to the commercialization of what is now known as Gracenote, MusicBrainz began in 2000 as a private project of Robert Kaye, now executive director of the MetaBrainz Foundation, under which the MusicBrainz project operates on a non-profit basis.
Distributed under the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation, MusicBrainz software products are open source and explicitly designed to avoid the same fate as CDDB (which many of the original contributing users believed to be open source).
Though there are many products and services listed on MusicBrainz, only the musicbrainz.org Web site and the Picard tagger--the two free, officially sanctioned, most easily accessible resources for the standard user--will be addressed in detail in this review.
The MusicBrainz database can be searched on its Web site in a variety of ways.
The relational database at the heart of MusicBrainz is album-based and contains detailed metadata about artists (including composers and performers), tracks, audio track signatures, releases, and labels.
As a completely user-maintained and user-contributed database, MusicBrainz has instituted a style council to create and edit official style guidelines.
Originally following the model of CDDB, which was designed to handle pop/rock music in a now-typical artist/release/title structure, MusicBrainz has developed various iterations for handling classical music, though for the time being still shoehorns classical music into that structure.