Music Warehouses: Challenges for the Next Generation of Music Search Engines

Music Information Retrieval has received increasing attention from both the industrial and the research communities in recent years. Many audio extraction techniques providing content-based music information have been de- veloped, sparking the need for intelligent storage and retrieval facilities. This pa- per proposes to satisfy this need by extending technology from business-oriented data warehouses to so-called music warehouses that integrate a large variety of music-related information, including both low-level features and high-level musi- cal information. Music warehouses thus help to close the "semantic gap" by sup- porting integrated querying of these two kinds of music data. This paper presents a number of new challenges for the database community that must be taken up to meet the particular demands of music warehouses.