[MEI-L] Compatibility and roadmap

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear Christopf,

welcome to the list. 

> Dear MEI-List, 
> 
> I'm entirely new to the MEI and this list, but am interested in MEI as someone working with TEI in the DARIAH project in Germany, a project in which some music scholars from Detmold are also involved. In recent discussions about MEI, two questions have come up for which we did not really find a good answer: 
> 
> 1. We suppose there is some experience with compatibility and transformation of MEI to/from MusicXML, but is this also true for MEI to/from TEI, or to which extent does this seem feasible?

MusicXML can be transformed into MEI (though I'm not sure if the XSLT already covers the freshly released MusicXML 3.0 and the current state of MEI). As of yet, there is no way back to MusicXML, as MEI offers a couple of features not covered by MusicXML. For instance, MEI offers ways to encode ambiguity and multiple versions of a piece of music, whereas MusicXML is suited only for "linear" musical texts. We're already planning some tools to "flatten" an MEI file into something that can be converted to MusicXML (or any other format). The first part of this is certainly more tricky than the second. But in any case, you will loose information when converting from MEI to something else. MEI is certainly the format that allows the most verbose encoding of notational features.
A conversion to or from TEI makes no sense in my opinion. MEI is for musical documents, TEI is for textual documents. There are situations where you're facing a mixture of both kinds of  text, in which case you will want to include MEI in TEI (or vice versa). Together with the TEI SIG Music, the MEI community has proposed a model for this, and it seems that it will be incorporated into the next release of TEI P5 (see http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Music/twm/index.html). This proposal also includes the possibility to use a TEI header together with an MEI body. When comparing the headers of TEI and MEI you will notice a couple of differences, most of which are justified by the different content models of TEI and MEI (a TEI header certainly needs no incipit element…). 

>  
> 2. Is there a roadmap for MEI development? Some people in DARIAH are beginning to work on a Metadata Crosswalk and would like to include MEI in this, but we would obviously need a somewhat stable version at least of the "meiHead" for this to make sense. 
> 

I know that the MEI website is somewhat outdated (which we hope to address rather soon). last year, we published a first stable version of MEI called 2010-05, which is available on the website. We're currently working on the next release, which will hopefully be available late this year, but maybe not before early next year. This release will bring MEI closer to TEI P5. Most changes to 2010-05 deal with the header, whereas the encoding of music does not change significantly. Most of the work necessary for the next release has to do with accompanying Guidelines etc., whereas the schema itself is already quite mature. We already announced a feature freeze, but some minor changes might still make it into the next release eventually. You will find the current ODD development version of the schema at http://code.google.com/p/music-encoding/source/browse/#svn%2Fbranches%2FMEI_2011_dev. 




> Any cues on these issues would be very welcome!
> Best, 
> Christof 
> 

I hope this gives you a good start on MEI. If you have any further questions on this or other issues, I'm sure that the list is happy to help you where possible. 

Best regards,
Johannes




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