Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Canonical names
Author: Jim Stegman Posted: 8/9/2000; 9:23:32 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 8/9/2000 Msg #: 19609 (In response to 19603) Prev/Next: 19608 / 19610
My biggest conceptual problem now is having a canonical way to refer to songs. How can I tell if two people are referring to the same song?I think this is an area where Userland can really help:
- You could keep a centralized db of artists/titles, each with a unique id.
- When I add a song to RU, it would attempt to find the "correct" spelling, artist, etc. Perhaps a list would be sent back, allowing me to pick the correct one. A heuristic could be used to assemble the list.
- After I pick, my song now has the correct title, artist, etc.
- If your central db ever gets updated, i.e. a title/artist name is changed, my copy of RU will get updated in time.
- If there is no match in step 2, there could be an option where I add an entry to the RU central database, since I am likely to know the correct artist, etc.
- RU central would double-check my entry, in case the heuristic didn't produce the correct record for me to pick. We don't want duplicate records if we can help it.
There are a number of obvious flaws in this scheme, but it might be reworked to address those as well.
Then artists like Prince are going to give us grief when they change their names, or try to go nameless.
I don't think you should retroactively make the change for previous works. (like it would in a relational database) The song should be stamped with the name the artist used at the time of release.
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