Unified search and browse interface for musicbrainz

Abstract

MusicBrainz provides an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public for free. The musicbrainz.org [1] website currently supports an advanced query search to browse the music metadata database with queries that allow to specify descriptive search such as “The artist groups who started their career between 1992 and 2000”. This search functionality is built using the Apache Lucene search library and one has to be familiar with the Lucene search syntax in order to type in a valid query that fulfils their need. If not, one will have to refer to a huge documentation that contains all the possible keywords for each entity in the database, which would consume a considerable amount of effort and time. This paper describes a solution to this issue developed by creating an interface that unifies the advanced query search with a simple indexed search while allowing the user to do any search that they could have done using the existing search functionality without needing any prior knowledge on Lucene search syntax or other documentation.