Music information description by mark-up languages within DB-Web applications

We are working on several projects addressing the digitalization and restoration of legacy musical archives. We are dealing with several sources of musical information (audio, notation, performance, video, images, etc.). On one hand, these sources are similar to those of usual multimedia databases. On the other hand, some specific feature of legacy musical archives call for ad-hoc solutions. In legacy musical databases many relations are implied by the framework (for instance recordings of parts of the same piece), but not made explicit in the content. To address this specific feature, we propose a three-level database schema where the bottom level(source level) describes the source material; the mid level (logical level) describes explicit and implied relationships among bottom-level data; and finally, the top level (catalog level) represents the common catalog data attached to pieces (composer, conductor, data of recording). To support this methodology, we need a language to describe musical content. We survey several mark-up languages (such as SMDL and XML derived languages) and discuss their features w.r.t. our proposed layered database schema.