MuDoc FAQ

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Note: please feel free to add your questions and answers below!

What does MuDoc mean?

MuDoc stands for "MUltimedia DOCumentation" or "MUsic DOCumentation". Its intended purpose is the latter, while its capabilities encompass the former.

(Disambiguation: Mudoc also stands for "Meaning Unit DOCument", a term coined by the Mudoc Corporation, a company incorporated in Tempe, Arizona, in 1974 to develop the tools of "the mudoc technology." Mudoc Corporation mudoc tools are described at mudoc.com.)

What does MuDoc do?

MuDoc provides a mechanism for collecting music recordings (audio, video) and other forms of music documentation (notations, texts, images), digitally archiving them, and making them available to a broad audience. MuDoc provides basic facilities for restricting use, and for ensuring high quality via a peer review process.

MuDoc is designed to

  • allow content (assets) with associated metadata and keywords to be submitted, peer reviewed, and ultimately incorporated into a digital repository
  • manage multiple roles, including editor and reviewer roles
  • allow construction of asset hierarchies
  • allow for searching by metadata or keywords attached to content, and retrieval of content
  • enforce digital rights, including conditions prohibiting downloads, or allowing downloads for a fee (e-commerce) to be returned to artists and content providers
  • enable annotation of stored information
  • enable linking of one object to another
  • allow a repository federation (distributed set of repositories, linked through a central hub, or "broker") to appear coherently as a single repository

What are keywords?

  • Keywords are named concepts, arranged in a non-hierarchical inclusion relation ('directed acyclic graph', dag), which are used for submission, search, and role assignments. You can think of a 'directed acyclic graph' as a tree-like structure or organizational chart, except that any node (concept or keyword) can have more than one parent. However cycles are not allowed - this follows from the semantics of the graph: that a link from node x to node y (x is a 'parent' of y) implies that x's concept includes y's. For instance, keyword "Egypt" can have multiple child keywords (Cairo, Alexandria, Aswan) as well as multiple parent keywords (Africa, Middle East).
  • Keywords allow MuDoc to assign editors and reviewers, since each editor or reviewer is assigned one or more keywords.
  • Keywords also allow for flexible searching, including a "recursive search", in which searching on keyword "Africa" locates any asset labelled with keyword "Africa" or any of its descendant keywords (including, for instance, "Egypt").
  • Users can submit new keywords, following completion of a peer review process akin to that applied to content submissions. At the moment keywords can only be submitted at the bottom of the dag: you can assign one or more parents to a new keyword, but not one or more children.
  • Since the keyword dag is relatively stable, it can be considered a standard authority for describing assets.

What is metadata?

Metadata is information attached to content, "data about (content) data". An example of metadata is the title of a submission. MuDoc's standard metadata model is Dublin Core, but other models are possible too. Keywords could be considered a form of metadata, in the general sense, but in the specific MuDoc sense they're distinct from metadata. Eventually we hope to have the ability to assign keyword dags (directed acyclic graphs) to metadata fields as authority lists (controlled sets of terms used in information retrieval), but at the moment metadata information is entered as free-text.

The only "authority", therefore, is the keyword dag.

What are roles?

There are two possible roles beyond ordinary user: "editor" and "reviewer".

  • Each keyword may have one or more editors or reviewers associated.
  • Editors guide a review process and make a final decision
  • Reviewers provide feedback to editors upon request
  • Submissions are guided to the most appropriate editor, who then selects the most appropriate reviewers from a list. "Appropriateness" is calculated wholly (for editors) or partly (for reviewers) by the submission's keyword(s).
  • The Editor in chief is the editor for the "root" keyword, the universal concept of which all other concepts/keywords are included.

How do I become a reviewer or editor?

Role requests are handled as a kind of submission, though in this case rather than submitting content or a keyword, you are submitting yourself! Therefore role requests are peer reviewed, in the same way that new content or keywords are peer reviewed.


Source(s): MuDoc FAQ