Toward MUI: Ontology assisted global identification of Audio Resources

For machine and individuals to successfully exchange annotations about audio resources, a technique is needed to provide these with stable identifiers. In this paper we propose ontological definitions of some identification problems and discuss the preliminary conceptual structure of the Music URI Infrastructure (MUI) project. The idea behind MUI is that of designing a distributed infrastructure to provide stable or seldom changing identifiers to clients querying about audio recordings they might possess either in directly audible format (e.g MP3) or in low level metadata only (MPEG-7). In designing MUI, special care has been taken in efficiently addressing the most common use cases, e.g. naming of audio resources downloaded from the Internet. In this case, MUI attempts to make optimal use of the existing metadata, acknowledging that this might be incomplete, partially or totally incorrect.