Envoke has just made a developer contribution to Kendraio, thanks to our recent grant from the Australia Council.
Our first step in the collaboration is to begin working on a data ingestion tool, working with the sample metadata sets we’ve received from dozens of independent labels, publishers, managers and artists across the world.
The design concept of the tool is to easily match columns across data sets, as this is one of the frequently raised issues across databases, as we’ve seen a very wide range of datasets from the labels who have joined Envoke.
While some basic standards exist (for obvious fields like “title”) there is often much that is highly unique across these individual databases that labels maintain. Simple variations like “artist” and “artist name” means matching breaks down; this gets highly complex with more unique fields.
Envoke CSO Peter Harris first met Kendraio founder Daniel Harris (no relation) in London in 2016 at Imogen Heap’s first Mycelia hackathon weekend. Their collective vision for interoperable tools, collaborative work processes, open source software and data sovereignty is in complete alignment with Envoke’s vision for solving the music industry’s metadata crisis.
From the Kendraio website:
Kendraio is a nonprofit interoperability advocacy initiative. Our mission is to empower individuals through the benefits that come from increased interoperability and a culture of data-sharing.
Our current focus is on the creative industries, specifically the music industry, but the benefits and transformative attributes of interoperability apply to all areas of public and personal life. Access to large amounts of high-quality data empowers individuals, businesses and governments to make better decisions more quickly and more efficiently. This creates better legislation, products, as well as a more informed population and these things, in turn, lead to healthier economies and better quality of life.