Connecting the Dots: Music Metadata Generation, Schemas and Applications

With the ever-increasing amount of digitized music becoming available, metadata is a key driver for different music related application domains. A service that combines different metadata sources should be aware of the existence of different schemas to store and exchange music metadata. The user of a metadata provider could benefit from knowledge about the metadata needs for different music application domains. In this paper, we present how we can compare the expressiveness and richness of a metadata schema for an application. To cope with different levels of granularity in metadata fields we defined clusters of semantically related metadata fields. Similarly, application domains were defined to tackle the fine-grained functionality space in music applications. Next is shown to what extent music application domains and metadata schemas make use of the metadata field clusters. Finally, we link the metadata schemas with the application domains. A decision table is presented that assists the user of a metadata provider in choosing the right metadata schema for his application.