Editorial metadata in the Cuidado music browser: between universalism and isolationism

We address the metadata management problem in the context of future electronic music distribution (EMD) systems. We propose a classification of existing musical editorial systems in two categories: the isolationists and the universalists. Universalists propose shared information, at the expense of consensuality. Isolationists approaches allow individual parameterization, at the expense of reusability. We propose an architecture and a system for managing editorial metadata that lies in the middle of these two extreme viewpoints: we organize musical editorial information in such a way that users can benefit from shared metadata when they wish, while allowing them to create and manage a private version of editorial information. A mechanism allows synchronizing both views (the shared and the private view). We describe the architecture and the application in progress, in the context of the Cuidado European IST project.