i first had this idea a couple of years ago, that i think has some potential, but i wouldn’t know if it’s worth the hassle, so i kept myself from posting about it somewhere whenever i considered it. i’m also not sure if this has been proposed or discussed before; i would assume someone has to have come up with this in the past. but i guess it doesn’t hurt to just throw it out there, so:
it might be nice for there to exist a “central” or “common” database that provides certain data to the other projects. i believe the name MetaBrainz might be fitting for this, which would store data like people and areas, and then projects like MusicBrainz and BookBrainz would use this data where needed. sort of like Wikimedia does with Commons and Wikidata.
so an artist like Richard D. James would have a MetaBrainz entry with all of his personal data (legal name, birth place and date, personal relationships, etc.), and then Aphex Twin and all his many other acts would have MusicBrainz entries related to his person entry and pull any relevant data from it, and MusicBrainz would store only music data (act names, releases, recordings, other music databases IDs, …).
likewise, JRR Tolkien would have a MetaBrainz person entry that feeds both his artist and author entries.
the same applies for areas (and maybe places?). i think there’s so much work done here amounting to, basically, a geographical database, for it to be only for MusicBrainz. i believe all this data would serve more as common data that can be used by other projects like BookBrainz or maybe future projects (FilmBrainz, please? ArtBrainz, anybody?).
we might then consider other common data like languages and pronouns (when implemented). companies would also have to be discussed.
many questions arise as i’m typing this, but i guess this would be the basic idea. is it worth it? thank you for coming to my Brainz Talk.
I posted something similar in the *Brainz fantasy list about two years ago… even used J.R.R. Tolkien as an example, lol (tho I favor DataBrainz as a name, having a unique two-letter acronym from other MeB projects is a plus)
thinking about it again, it might be best to have this as sort of a back-end database for the most part, maybe not directly editable (save for merges and splits or something) and leave editing on the sub-projects more or less as is. that way you wouldn’t have to open up a different project to add a Rate Your Music or Bandcamp link on MusicBrainz, but a Bluesky or official homepage link would show up on BookBrainz once it’s added on MusicBrainz
alternatively, we could see about using Wikidata for this sort of role, tho as mentioned in the thread linked above, I’m not sure if there’s any requirements for having a Wikidata entry, like notability or whatever
i knew i couldn’t be the only one thinking of something like this! funny that we both also referenced JRR Tolkien. great brainz edit alike… (you can trademark that, MeB!)
“MetaBrainz” seemed fitting since it’s the parent project and it would be a database to rule them all, but i agree, “DataBrainz” might be a better name and would give us an abbreviation different from MB in the MetaBerse.
i think, however, things like external links should remain in MB if they are directly related to a music act. my suggestion for a DB would be to collect very common data, like people (as opposed to acts/personas), geography, languages, etc. i do understand your idea, though, and it’s definitely pretty close to mine. hopefully it’s something feasible and actually useful.
(you can trademark that, MeB!)