Summary:
* Create three new AR Classes, "External Resource Relationship Class",
"External Information Relationship Class", and "External Website
Relationship Class".
* Decommission and remove "Discography Relationship Class", "Online Data
Relationship Class", and "Other Databases Relationship Class".
* Merge "Official Site Relationship Type" into "Official Homepage
Relationship Type", decomissioning "Official Site Relationship Type".
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The primary Class, "External Resource Relationship Class", would be created
by merging together Discography Relationship Class, Other Databases
Relationship Class, and Online Data Relationship Class.
* Discography Relationship Class is problematic at the moment. It is
supposed to be "links to discographic resources", but it's a very tenuous
argument to claim that some of these ARs could be considered "discographic".
* Online Data Relationship Class is problematic in two ways. Unlike all the
other AR Classes, save one, this one is defined by what it links to, not
what it holds. By definition, "This is a class of relationships that record
relations between Labels and urls. They are all Label-URL Relationships."
Except... not all label ARs are in this Class, and not all ARs in this class
are exclusively label-URL ARs. In other words, this Class doesn't actually
mean anything, let alone what it claims to mean. The other problem here is
that the other Class which groups RT's by entity, not subject, is "Label
Relationship Class" (a meta-Class), which is entirely redundant to this one,
in that it too "is a "meta" class of relationships that records relations
involving Labels."
* Other Databases Relationship Class isn't problematic, per say. However,
the one thing all the ARs in these three classes *do* have in common is that
they link to a page outside of MusicBrainz. "Online databases" becomes
difficult to define, vs the ARs not already in this class - Discogs is
clearly a database, but is Youtube, at least to some degree, not also a
database of videos?
The only real type of difference between the ARs in this new class is that
some point to any page at a specific website, whereas the others are
generalized such that they point to one type of page at any website. So two
classes, "External Information Relationship Class" and "External Website
Relationship Class", would be created to hold each group. These two Classes
would themselves be members of the new "External Resource Relationship
Class".
Affiliate Relationship Class contains, like Other Databases RC, ARs which
link elsewhere (Amazon only, atm). There is a worthwhile distinction for
this class's meaning, however; the only change here would be to make that
class a subclass of the new "External Website Relationship Class".
So, the new structure I propose would look like this:
+ External Resource Relationship Class
+ External Information Relationship Class
* Biography Relationship Type
* Catalog Site Relationship Type
* Discography Relationship Type
* Fanpage Relationship Type
* HasNewsCoverage Relationship Type
* History Site Relationship Type
* Image Relationship Type
* Logo Relationship Type
* Official Homepage Relationship Type
* Review Relationship Type
+ External Website Relationship Class
+ Affiliate Relationship Class
* Amazon Relationship Type
* BBCMusic Relationship Type
* Discogs Relationship Type
* MusicMoz Relationship Type
* MySpace Relationship Type
* MySpace Relationship Type
* Wikipedia Relationship Type
* YouTube Relationship Type
Note, I left Official Site Relationship Type out of the above list; I'll get
to that one in a moment.
The new Classes would be defined in this way:
This class defines relationships that allow MusicBrainz to interact with
affiliate sites on the internet.
* External Resource Relationship Class
This class defines relationships that allow MusicBrainz to interact
with other sources of data outside of MusicBrainz.
* External Information Relationship Class
This class defines relationships that allow MusicBrainz to interact
with specific types of information found outside of MusicBrainz.
* External Website Relationship Class
This class defines relationships that allow MusicBrainz to interact
with specific websites.
* Affiliate Relationship Class
This class defines relationships that allow MusicBrainz to interact
with affiliate sites on the internet.
NOTE: This is unchanged; ^^ is the definition that already is in place
for this Relationship Class.
Last, to merge Official Homepage Relationship Type and Official Site
Relationship Type into Official Homepage Relationship Type. The
implementations of each can be left alone; there is no overlap between the
label-URL AR and the artist-URL AR. However, the data each links to is of
the same type, to such as degree that each uses the word "homepage" for
linking text. Yes - "Official Site Relationship Type" actually reads as
'label has an official homepage at url', just as "Official Homepage
Relationship Type" actually reads as 'artist has an official homepage at
URL'. There's no need for two identical-in-all-but-name AR Types; thus,
this would essentially just move the label-URL AR from being of type
"Official Site Relationship Type" to type "Official Homepage Relationship
Type", and eliminate "Official Site Relationship Type".
This RFC is RFC-92. Without objection, it will go to RFV on 2010-03-07.
Brian
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