Development/Summer of Code/2011

Ideas for Google's Summer of Code

The MetaBrainz Foundation is applying as a Google Summer of Code organization this year. This will allow MusicBrainz hackers to apply for the Summer of Code program and if accepted, get paid for hacking on MusicBrainz.

This page discussed various ideas for project that people can take on during their Summer of Code:

Collaborative Filtering: Artist - Artist Relationships

Currently MusicBrainz has very old and stale artist to artist relationship data. This data provides an indication of how closely (musically) two artists are related. The data we're currently using was derived from crawling the Gnutella network and determining relationship data based on what music people have in their music collection.

Rather than relying on external data sources, it would be best to rely on our internal data from the MusicBrainz project. Useful piece of data include:

• various artist albums -- two artists that are on a compilation together are likely to be somewhat similar.
• search logs -- one user searching for a number of artists also gives an indication of similarity.
• artist subscription -- the artists that MusicBrainz users subscribe should also yield some information.

This project should figure out what data sources to use, write the code to collect data from these sources and then generate new artist-artist data.

Skills required: Perl, Python and SQL

User Interface improvements: Creative Commons Integration

Right now the support for indicating Creative Commons licenses inside of MusicBrainz is minimal and has not been widely used. This project would entail working with the Creative Commons to improve the current support. Also, people dedicating a new piece of music on the Creative Commons site should have some way of being passed over to MusicBrainz to enter metdata for their music into MusicBrainz. This would involve making a number of user interface improvements to MusicBrainz to make the site more friendly to Creative Commons users who are not steeped in the MusicBrainz philosophy.

Skills required: Perl, JavaScript and SQL

User Interface improvements: Artist Page Redesign

The current artist/release pages are in dire need of being redesigned. Some work on this front had been started in ArtistPageRedesign, but now abandoned. This work needs to be re-evaluated and freshened up. The implementation of this would require adding support for JSON in our current web service and for lots of user interface work.

Skills required: Perl, JavaScript and SQL

More ideas

If you have more ideas for the Summer of Code, please add them here.