Critical Semantic Properties of Music Notation Datasets

The semantics of notation systems can naturally be meta-modelled as a network of transformations, starting with the syntactic elements of the notation and ending with the parameters of an execution. In this context, a digital encoding format for music notation can be seen as selecting a subset of the data nodes of this network for storage, leaving others to evaluation. For such a selection, semantic properties are defined which have impact on the practical costs of maintenance, migration, extension, etc.