A long time ago I had a teacher who told me there are only two data structures, trees and chaos. He recommended trees. And for a long time, I followed his advice and built systems based on trees. But eventually it became clear the world is more complicated. If we have to deal with chaos, we have to learn to control chaos.
You’re right that I’m really raising two separate issues. The Norma Winstone situation: you do support multi-owner but you have some implementation flaws. But the Miles Davis Quintet situation is different. The Quintet is not a robust or durable identity. It is just descriptive, belongs in the album description but not as an artist. Hadn’t thought about that.
But what is the right way to handle it? In principle, we should honor the artist’s (or publisher’s) choice. So Norma Winstone, John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler played in a group that got a name, Azimuth, and we should use that name. But for some reason, the Winstone/Gesing/Venier trio didn’t get a name, just played under those three names. Not anybody’s trio, just the three individuals. Implying a democratic situation. Norma Winstone also recorded an album under her own name, with John Taylor and Tony Coe: the use of her name indicates a leadership situation. These are the artist’s prerogatives and we should respect them.
But The Supremes evolved into The Supremes with Diana Ross, and later Diana Ross with the Supremes, and eventually Diana Ross. The evolution of artistic and commercial and political power may have been significant to the people involved, but I don’t care and I don’t want the albums to show up in four different places in the catalog (if I had any Supremes albums).
So it is tricky to decide. But in any case, we have two different issues.
- The system needs to support complex relationships including multiple owners – the world is a DAG.
- Curating the metadata to represent the data in a sensible way, respecting the artists’ choices.
Curating is labor intensive and boring. The solution should not be based on that. When we have to, we’ll do it and the system should support it. But automation is the key.
If I wanted to be a curator, I would have been one.