MusicBrainz Summit/5

Summit Notes

Thursday, November 20th 2003 (Dave and Rob in Bedford)

• daily.sh
  • Switch data dumps to every other day to save bandwidth
  • Put replication in place and then switch full dumps to once a week
  • Possibly add another replication off site machine to do RDF dumps
  • Synchronize the data dumps/RDF dumps to align with replication packet serial numbers

• Review of progress on the Advanced Relationships work
  • AdvancedRelationships coming along -- perhaps a week's work (system time) work left to beta.
  • Do a complete event model later
  • Release Events: (complete)
    • Create a new table that covers: release event (optional month/date), territory ISO two letter country code
    • * May optionally add release notes later if need arises
    • * Add a default two letter country code to preferences

• • Consider a general notes concept that allows us to attach notes to any entity

• Linking to MB
  • Make the artist and release pages use MBIDs to allow weblogs and other pages to easy link to MB.
    • Perhaps create an internal caching scheme to not impact the database looking up slower ids

• • Create a JavaScript method for copying links to MB with icons
  • Consider creating a supercession table to allows forwarding of MBIDs in case releases get merged, deleted, etc.
    • Keep track of last used date and lookup counts to allow pruning this data

• Discuss necessary changes for the mb_server for replication
  • Use separate user for replication and let this user write to the DB. Normal musicbrainz_user would have no write access on the slaves
  • Add a mirror sever setting to DBDefs.pm
  • Have the login page redirect to the main server.
  • Have the possibility of replicating sanitized moderator information.
  • Deny RDF submits for mirror servers
  • Check out what other pages need to redirect to the main server (reports)

• Further replication tasks:
  • Schema version # (monotonically increasing, starting at 1)
  • Store current schema version # in DbDefs.pm
  • Require users to hand update from CVS initially if schema version # changes. Later we will add a more automated method for updating.

Friday November 21st 2003

In attendance:

• Jamie Munro (host)
• Dave Evans
• Robert Kaye

Karma system

• Not all contributions can be redeemed for all benefits. (eg. a cash contribution should not give moderation trust)
• Contributions:
  • Code, testing, documentation -> leads to developer trust
  • Moderating, voting -> leads to moderator reputation/trust
  • Cash -> leads to cash reputation
  • Referrals via the HTML links to MB -> leads to promotion reputation/trust

• Benefits
  • automod status can only be archived via mod/vote contributions
  • Advanced tagger features can be accessed by achieving a certain karma level
  • schwag/amazon credit (give out a percent of of $$$ taken in)
  • credit/visibility (visual cues, email@mb alias)
  • Core supporters (identify and credit the core people who make MB happen)

Notes:

• Use points not cash
• Core supporters can give points for thinker or other non-tangible contributions
• Use a weighting system to determine if people qualify for a certain benefit
• Automod contributions use a sliding window (must maintain votes/mod to maintain status)
• Cash donations unlock advanced tagger features for a fixed period of time.

Improve voting issues:

• Finish the one moderation release edit feature
• Number of votes required to pass a moderation is inversely proportional to quality of the moderator (good moderators will require few or no votes, bad/unknown moderators require more votes)
• Automoderators can cast more votes than one (moderators can chose how many votes to cast)
• When logged in, add an iframe to the artist/release pages that shows one moderation to vote on:
  • Show votes for this artist or if none, then
  • Show votes for artists in the subscribed list, or if none, then
  • Show votes for related artists, or if none, then
  • Show random votes

Other suggestions:

• Jamie suggest that we need to create a mozilla search plugin a la MusicMoz (got to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ and search for music)
• Jamie suggest that we should have a type of moderator that is specific to a band -- hopefully a band member. This moderator could have veto power over the changes made to the artist in question.

Saturday November 22nd 2003

In attendance:

• Audioscrobbler/Last.fm: RJ, Russ, John
• MusicMoz: Richard Fuller
• MusicBrainz: Robert, Dave, Jamie

Audioscrobbler/Last.fm notes:

• Audioscrobbler to host own MB database mirror to handle plugin lookups
• AS plans to integrate tagging features in AS plugins
• MB tagger should do some statistical gathering to create a graph of tagger accuracy
• Relationships: Artist to artist and release to release, no track to track because of resource issues. May become possible once MB is fully integrated
• People to people matching profiles
• Some moderation voting atop Audioscrobbler pages if required
• RipCd.pl for RJ and/or add ripping support to Tagger to aid the ripping process of Last.fm
• Special MB moderator should be created that submits moderations from AS/last.fm
• How do we share logins?
  • At first AS will require regular MB logins
  • Later we may create a Web service for creating login
  • or share logins with as_username

• Jamie will contact the Liberty Alliance about single login -- perhaps we can be an example case

MusicMoz:

• Contains accurate info that doesn't disappear
• Uses the same structure as dmoz
• Contains reviews, releases, general info about artist
• Whole database is a hierarchy.
• Runs on donated hardware/software
  • requires a new more powerful server for mirror

• CC license is a question to put to the community, uses DMOZ license currently

MusicMoz integration plan

• Goal: Add MusicMoz links to the MB website and encourage MB users to participate in MusicMoz
• initial match of artists and loading: provide artist name, sortname, mbid, releases and release ids to RF
• for creating a new artist musicmoz sends artist, sortname, uuid, and musicmoz url to MB via the webservice
• artists that are linked with musicmoz cannot be changed
  • if mb users want to edit the name then a note is shown and http POST is done to MM site to request the change
  • MM editors can edit artist names via the webs service

• MB cannot delete artist if linked to MusicMoz
• MusicMoz linked artists cannot be merged into another artist. Other way around is ok.

MusicMoz new webservice features:

• AddArtist
  • Send: name, sortname, moz URL
  • Ret: MBID

• EditArtist
  • Send: MBID, newname, newsortname
  • Ret: OK

• PendingActionNotice
  • Send: text, mod id, mod link
  • ret: ok

Misc Notes:

• Can we use FOAF to express musical interest (mail Dan Brickley and cc: RJ) (done)
• Mail BPM database guy. Our official response is: Hmmm
• Once the triple alliance (AS, MB, MM) gets going we should do a press release
• May consider adding details of the alliance to the metabrainz pages.
• ISMIR: We should submit paper about MB to let the ISMIR crowd know about MB.