Saturday, June 12, 2010

Taxonomy

Since I come from a background of several different cultures, it shouldn't be any surprise that the music I listen to and the films I see aren't necessarily isolated to North American media. My iTunes has an array of music spanning North America, Europe and Asia. From my experience with iTunes, there doesn't seem to be any simply way of organizing my media based on my chosen preferences.

I have jazz music performed by Taiwanese artists. I have pop music from Hong Kong, Hiphop in Korean, and even triphop where the lyrics are a mixture of Japanese and French. iTunes will only allow the music to be categorized into one "genre". How silly is that? Is it possible to organize the film "The Dark Knight" into just one category? Science fiction? Suspense? Crime? Drama?

At the moment, there are independent taxonomy projects on the web where groups of developers are forming standards that can allow developers to create software which will easily talk to each other. iTunes hasn't changed much in terms of features but I'm hoping Apple will consider giving users the ability to organize their collected media.

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