Patent ID: 7136866

Claim:
A method of managing metadata comprising: maintaining a database of metadata records, said metadata records each corresponding to one or more media files and containing information relating to content of the corresponding media files, said media files having associated physical identifiers based on physical properties of the media files and being adapted for rendering by a media player program executed on one or more client computers; generating a unique logical identifier for each of the metadata records, said logical identifiers being configured for use in querying the metadata database. wherein said logical identifiers are independent of physical identifiers associated with said media files; defining a base type corresponding to each of the logical identifiers, said base types being representative of the information contained in the respective metadata records for the corresponding logical identifiers; storing the logical identifiers and the base types in an ID registry; defining associations between the logical identifiers and the base types: and defining an associations table of the ID registry, said associations table having a schema containing a column for the logical identifiers and a column for source identifiers; wherein at least a portion of the information relating to the content of the media files contained in the metadata records is provided by a third party data provider said third party data provider using provider identifiers for identifying the information, and further comprising mapping the logical identifiers to the provider identifiers in the ID registry.