MuDoc system

MuDoc (Multimedia/Music Documentation) is a general digital repository designed to store and disseminate digitized ethnomusicological fieldwork (though suitable--in principle--for any media content), with the following features:

• Distributed database, via federated brokerage (a single portal communicates with multiple repositories via a central broker system
• Web portal interface
• Web submissions of hierarchical multimedia content (e.g. audio, video, text, notation, image, arranged in a "folder" hierarchy)
• Peer review system (enabling users to request editorial or reviewer roles, and providing a complete peer-review workflow)
• Permanent storage and backup of accepted submissions
• Non-hierarchical keyword ontology (supporting peer review and search)
• Tagging of submissions with keywords and metadata
• Annotation: submitting objects to annotate other objects (including annotations)
• Linking submissions to existing repository objects, generally
• Search by keyword or metadata
• Rudimentary DRM (digital rights management), including e-commerce
• Downloading content (subject to DRM restrictions)

MuDoc's initial deployment will reside at folkwaysAlive, in the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology (Department of Music, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta).

MuDoc's inventors are Michael Frishkopf and David Descheneau, with open source brokerage components contributed by Sun Microsystems, and programming from Sun and AICT.