Establish Consistent Naming Format
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 7:22 am
While the IMSLP is pretty good in this regard, there's still room for improvement: it would vastly help with searches, organization, and clean appearance if an absolute standard was set for how to name scores, and if searching could be modified to be a little smarter.
For example, consider the following searches:
"Sonatinas" - turns up 31 works
"Sonatines" - turns up 5 works
"Sonatina" - turns up 34 works
"Sonatine" - turns up 26 works
Most obviously, singular and plural should probably both turn up the same results (perhaps ranked with the search term you used showing up first - a search for "sonatinas" will list works with "sonatinas" in the title, then "sonatina").
But the larger issue has to do with consistency in naming:
- Is it really useful to keep generic form-terms (such as sonatina, rondo, albumleaf, etc.) the same as the original language? What if the original language includes weird characters? Personally, I think it would be better to have a standard, and then variants for the language the piece is in could come afterward. For example
3 Sonatinas for Piano (3 Sonatines pour Piano)
This will help people to find the pieces they're looking for. It's just not always feasible to know which term one should be searching for unless those names are standardized.
Also, one other thing that definitely should be standardized (and in many cases, appears to be) is having a digit number, rather than a spelled-out number, before any work which has multiple pieces, such as 6 Preludes rather than Six Preludes, although again searching should be smart enough to turn in both.
There are other tweaks that could eventually be worked out; all piano sonatas should come up if someone searches "piano sonata" (if a file is named something like "Grande Sonata" it won't show up); same with any other type of instrumental work... either rig it so that including the instrument name keeps it in the search, or standardize it so that the instrument name appears in the title.
I know this is all a lot of work and it will probably come in the future, but I thought I'd mention it. You're doing a great job with the site.
For example, consider the following searches:
"Sonatinas" - turns up 31 works
"Sonatines" - turns up 5 works
"Sonatina" - turns up 34 works
"Sonatine" - turns up 26 works
Most obviously, singular and plural should probably both turn up the same results (perhaps ranked with the search term you used showing up first - a search for "sonatinas" will list works with "sonatinas" in the title, then "sonatina").
But the larger issue has to do with consistency in naming:
- Is it really useful to keep generic form-terms (such as sonatina, rondo, albumleaf, etc.) the same as the original language? What if the original language includes weird characters? Personally, I think it would be better to have a standard, and then variants for the language the piece is in could come afterward. For example
3 Sonatinas for Piano (3 Sonatines pour Piano)
This will help people to find the pieces they're looking for. It's just not always feasible to know which term one should be searching for unless those names are standardized.
Also, one other thing that definitely should be standardized (and in many cases, appears to be) is having a digit number, rather than a spelled-out number, before any work which has multiple pieces, such as 6 Preludes rather than Six Preludes, although again searching should be smart enough to turn in both.
There are other tweaks that could eventually be worked out; all piano sonatas should come up if someone searches "piano sonata" (if a file is named something like "Grande Sonata" it won't show up); same with any other type of instrumental work... either rig it so that including the instrument name keeps it in the search, or standardize it so that the instrument name appears in the title.
I know this is all a lot of work and it will probably come in the future, but I thought I'd mention it. You're doing a great job with the site.