A lot of the success of the MusicXML format has come from its iterative development, driven by the increasingly sophisticated needs of our customers and their applications. MusicXML 1.0 started out by representing musical semantics with some formatting data. This was good for initial interchange purposes, but not good enough for sheet music distribution and publication. MusicXML 2.0 now has the formatting features to enable near-lossless exchange and publication of digital sheet music.
I wrote about this in my XML 2006 paper on “Lessons from the Adoption of MusicXML as an Interchange Standard,” using the terms “iterative design” and “evolutionary delivery.” So it was interesting to see Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, advocating something very similar by calling it a “lazy” approach:
I think the future holds some very interesting possibilities for using XML databases like Mark Logic together with MusicXML documents. Joachim Ganseman will be giving a presentation on XQuery and MusicXML at the Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval in Philadelphia later this month.
Matt Turner from Mark Logic has also blogged about the possibilities of using XQuery in conjunction with MusicXML here.
Jim