Contact: Introduction to MEI
The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) schema is a set of rules for recording the intellectual and physical characteristics of music notation documents so that the information contained in them may be searched, retrieved, displayed, and exchanged in a predictable and platform-independent manner. The MEI rules are expressed in the form of a RelaxNG (RNG) schema.
The MEI is a community driven effort striving to make possible for music the same kinds of operations that are commonly performed on electronic texts such as compiling musical corpora, data interchange, and comparative analysis. Also, because music research routinely combines the study of manuscript sources, printed music editions and time-based media, the group is developing an encoding mechanism that facilitates the creation and management of relationships between components of digital versions of these materials.
