[mb-devel] Is there any more info on the ext:rating returned by the xmlwebservice when you sort for tracks without a Puid

[Paul Taylor]

Hi, I am trying to get a better understanding of how the filtering and 
the ext:rating work, I looked at the XMLWebService and the 
MusicBrainzXMLMetaData wiki pages but still unclear.

>From 
http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/XMLWebService?highlight=%28xml%29%7C%28schema%29
'For example, you can use a filter to only request artists with the name 
"Tori Amos": 
http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/artist/?type=*xml*&name=Tori+Amos. The 
Filters supported depend on the collection and are described below. Data 
returned from collections will also have an ext:rating value="[rating]" 
attribute that indicates the rating returned from the search engine -- 
the rating value is between 0 and 100.'

If you provide provide multiple parameters such as artist,title,release 
.. I take it is not a strict boolean 'AND' search and they are possibly 
weighted in some way,  but cannot find any details of how this works, I 
also assume that some the text values work on a soundex value or 
something but not sure.

here is an example query :

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/track?type=xml&artist=Abba&release=Abba+Gold&tracknum=02&title=Knowing+me+Knowing+you

This returns 25 tracks, most of them appear to be the correct song from 
various different releases, and the first two are for the correct album 
and have an ext:rating of 100, and the track offset matches the tracknum 
(assuiming trackoffset starts at zero and track number starts at one), a 
great result.

But if I (incorrectly) change tracknum to another value the same results 
are returned with the same ext:rating, it is great that it is finding a 
match but I dont understand why the rating is still 100

And if I change the title quite radically :
http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/track?type=xml&artist=Abba&release=Abba+Gold&tracknum=02&title=kjhkjkjkjjj+knowing+pou, 
it still continues to find the matches, and award them a rating 100 even 
though title is now substantially different.


thanks Paul Taylor