Hi, everyone: I would appreciate review and comments on RFC-339: Partial Works Relationship Inheritance. The full proposal is at http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Proposal:Partial_Works_Relationship_Inheritance http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Proposal:Partial_Works_Relationship_Inheritance . Comments welcome at that Wiki page, or on its Talk page, or here in this thread.
This RFC is open at least 7 days, until November 5 GMT or later. I consider what I have there a first draft, and I'll want to polish the text at least before it becomes a solid RFC. Summary: I propose defining an inheritance of relationships between any two Works joined by a Parts Relationship Type. This makes explicit the logical consequence of the Parts Relationship Type's meaning: that one Work entity is a part of another Work entity. Any Relationship which in any of the Work-relatedRelationship Family has its meaning inherited (except Parts Relationship Type, that would be too recursive). This proposal is implemented by three changes: 1. Adding a new page Style/Work/Partial Works Relationship Inheritance, with the text below 2. Adding a stub entry (below) to Style/Work (presently empty) to point to Style/Work/Partial Works Relationship Inheritance 3. Adding text (below) to Parts Relationship Type, summarising and referring to Style/Work/Partial Works Relationship Inheritance Motivation The composer, and sometimes librettist and arranger, are hugely important pieces of metadata for classical, opera, and musical theatre music. It's why we refer to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. These compositions are frequently recorded many times by many different performers, so more than other genres of music it will be common to have many Recordings point to a single Musicbrainz Work entity. And these compositions are large and long enough that a) the the composer breaks them into smaller pieces (movements, acts, scenes, arias, numbers), and b) Releases frequently break the recorded performance into multiple Tracks of a Release. Hence, there's great value for MusicBrainz in having a way to store metadata about musical compositions in a tree structure, with a single Work entity to represent the entire composition, and child Work entities to represent the composer or the Release publishers divisions of that composition. The Parts Relationship Type provides a way to represent a musical composition in MusicBrainz as a tree structure. Right now it is the only relationship between a whole composition and a partial composition. In the future, other relationship types may be added, but for now, it's the only one. The Parts Relationship Type description is silent about what meaning a relationship with the Work at one end of the Parts relationship has for the Work at the other end. At the same time, it's important to be clear to which Work entities Advanced Relationships like Composer and Librettist should be attached. In the past, there has been similar confusion about when Release-Artist relationship types should be used, when Track-Artist, for roles like Performer and Producer. This led to an extensive debate in 2007-2008; the tip of this iceberg can be seen at Talk:Artist Role Inheritance. Work entities are something of a blank slate. We should state principles now, before there are too many confounding entires in the database. Behind these reasons lurks a larger one. MusicBrainz ability to handle metadata for classical and opera works is hindered by the complexity of the cultural traditions for naming these compositions, and naming the Tracks and Releases of them. This is what has driven the Classical Style Guide to become such a snarl. I believe that the Works entity will likely be a part of the solution to this problem. While we don't know what form that solution will take, it's pretty clear to me that having tree-structured Works entities, and knowing who the Composer is, will be an important part. This proposal is hopefully a brick which will become a small part of the bridge to a better classical music and opera experience in MusicBrainz. Comments welcome! —Jim DeLaHunt http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:JimDeLaHunt -- View this message in context: http://musicbrainz-mailing-lists.2986109.n2.nabble.com/RFC-339-Partial-Works-Relationship-Inheritance-tp6939661p6939661.html Sent from the Style discussions mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list MusicBrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
