XML-Representation of Symbolic Music and Other Complex Time Structures

Chronicle is a new universal system for representing time-related data. Although the system was developed for the representation of symbolic music, it is readily applicable to other types of data with complex time structure, such as audio, multimedia, poetry, choreography, task scheduling, and so on. Different levels of complexity are supported. The lowest level deals with a stream of events ordered in time. Subsequent higher levels add the possibility to organize the data in groups and subgroups forming a hierarchical structure, local timing, automatic layout of sequential or parallel sections, association of data with other elements, working with multiple timescales, time mappings, and more. The system is primarily concerned with the treatment of time and structure. The domain developer is free to choose the event data types; timescales and organizational constraints most suited for the application. The Chronicle system defines an XML-based encoding based on a set of level-specific DTDs, but it also offers software support in the form of classes, interfaces, libraries for reading and writing XML, tools for level reduction, etc. It is hoped that developers of new XML-encodings in different domains can use Chronicle as a powerful base layer. The software can also be useful for researchers who need an easy and flexible way to store XML-data.