The MP3Importer is (supposed to) be a minor tool, that fills the users database with Song and Artist items from his MP3 music collection. Since this is not the core topic of the diploma thesis, it is not possible to spend much time on metadata checking.

Working principle

It is assumed that all mp3s are annotated correctly before there are imported.

For each mp3 file do:

1. Check if this file has been imported already
   To speed things up, common indexing techniques like in filesharing applications are used. For each file, its complete and canonical path and name is stored along with its date of last modification. At first, I wanted to store these information along with other information about the mp3 file using the skipmedia ontology, but there are some problems:
   • privacy concerns - the path to the file would be shared among all contacts, which might be a problem to some people
   • storage space - the file path and last modification date are to no use of other people than me, so this would increase the transfered data without use
   • computation problems - the path and last modification date are stored as normal RDF properties for simplicity reasons, but when mixed up with the data of other users, extra checking has to be done to ignore files from other users.

This leads me to the conclusion that an extra database for the importer is the best way to do it. The only piece of information that might be worth sharing between both databases is the md5sum of the mp3, so that a possible "play in audioplayer" command will succeed.

2. If the file has to (re)imported, calculate md5sum and extract all other information like artist, title, bitrate, etc.