Hello Lukáš, On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 07:55:43AM +0100, Lukáš Lalinský wrote: > We already do have tags, the majority (but not all) of which are > genres. What I proposed here was a layer above the tagging system, > which just helps people to give some meaning to the tags that we > already have. There are two main problems with tags for people who are > interested in extracting data from MB and want only genres, not other > tags: > > a) Tags can be anything and you can't intelligently filter them out > without having large whitelists. That is, given tags "hip hop, > hiphop, rap, usa" I want to be able to tell that only "hip hop", > "hiphop" and "rap" represent genres. > > b) People are free to enter tags however they want, so we see > things like "hip hop" and "hiphop" next to each other. We should be > able to tell that they are in fact the same genre.
I think the real problem is that we don't have the critical mass of people who contribute tags for Folksonomy tagging to work. For example, if hundreds or thousands of people use tags, probably one form, be it "hip hop" or "hiphop", will prevail. It doesn't matter that there are a few tags for the other, it will go under in the noise of other bogus or private tags. I also don't think the "non-genre" tags are completely non-genre. E.g. "usa" or "90s" can also work to further classify a genre. Why doesn't "usa, 90s, hiphop" or "german, 80s, new-wave" make sense for a genre? There are two reasons for the low usage of tags for genre I think. One is that we don't have enough active users [1], one is (as the other replies suggest) the whole topic of "genre" is too vague for some who love MB as a database of facts. [1] http://musicbrainz.org/statistics/timeline/main#+-v-+-c-core-entities+c-edit-information+-edit.open+-edit.perweek+-vote.perweek+-editor.votelastweek+-editor.editlastweek > What I want is to define what kind of genres are there, how are they > related and what tags people usually use to represent them. With this > information you can say that the tags "hip hop, hiphop, rap, usa" are > in fact mentioning only one genre - Hip-Hop. You can also say > from tags "psytrance" and "psy-trance" that both represent a genre > called Psychadelic Trance, which has its origins in Trance, which is a > style of Electronic music. How about creating a prototype for genre-classification outside of MB, and link it from MB via blog post? People who are interested can contribute, and it can be seen if it can work. Since, if I understand correctly, your aim is to relate genres among each other, it doesn't need to be inside MB for now. Johannes _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list MusicBrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
