> Subject: Re: Categories
>
> > On the current topic of Categories and category granularity,
> > CDDB has it all wrong.
>
> I still think music genres are bogus.
[snip]
> Make it optional, and the world will be happy. (and so will the developers)
Categories are a tricky issue. Whatever happens, I agree it should
be an optional 'hint'. It should add extra flavour to the database, but
shouldn't be an integral part of the structure. Personally I like
the idea, it would definately enrich the database, but it would need
to be thought out carefully.
> It might be helpful to make a distinction between objective and subjective
> information. Artist, title etc are facts. Categories are opinions.
Exactly.
Some questions/thoughts/spanners-in-the-works :
* The category set would need to be dynamic - new genre's are being
thought up all the time, no fixed set could be expected to cope with
everything (witness CDDB...)
* How fine-grained are the categories? Too coarse and you end up with
too many items lumped into the category to make it a useful filtering
criterion, too fine and it becomes tricky/laborious/ambiguous to pick
just the right category for an item.
* Can we trust people to know what the genre's mean precisely, so items
are labelled accurately? Can we ever know precisely what a category
means?
* Items should probably be associated with a set of categories, not
just one, so you can have rock/funk, ambient/electronic/trance etc.
This would help to alleviate 'ambiguity angst' - unsure about which
category? Put it in both.
* If a category becomes too big and needs to be split, who is going to
re-categorize all the affected items?
* <controversial> Perhaps CD entries should be associated with an 'owner'
i.e. the original submitter who could act as an authority for
recategorization </controversial>
* Or maybe there is a 'voting' mechanism whereby those who access entries
(presumably by playing the CD itself) could contribute a suggested
category(ies) via some menu choice ... just an idea....
* Perhaps categories should be aware of a heirarchy, so that 'techno'
and 'big-beat' are both sub-categories of 'dance', allowing a coarse
or fine-grained search. This would also allow a category split to
be implemented more gracefully, i.e. cd's which hadn't yet been
recategorized would still be labelled under the (equally valid)
super-category. Maybe more a yahoo-style heirarchy with different
links pointing around.
* I use the word 'item' above, as the DB should support the concept of
category applying to a whole album or an individual track (as should
'artist' etc).
It's dangerous, subjective territory, but the result could be quite cool.
Hmmm...
Cheers,
Brian.
-- ----------------------------------- Brian Murray Proximity Pty Ltd http://www.proximity.com.au/~brian/ -----------------------------------