System for browsing through a music catalog using correlation metrics of a ...

1. A method of assisting a user in browsing in an electronic catalog of media items, the method comprising:

(a) obtaining access to co-concurrency metric values derived from a knowledge base of mediasets associated with the electronic catalog; wherein the metric values reflect a level of co-concurrency for each of the pairs of media items within the knowledge base of mediasets and the co-concurrency metric values are independent of the content of the media items; and further wherein the co-concurrency metric values indicate, for each pair of media items (i,j), how many times item i and item j appear together within any of the mediasets of the knowledge base, so that the co-concurrency metric values are not affected by any descriptor, characteristic, rating, classification or attribute of the media items' content;

(b) receiving from the user an initial selection of at least one media item from the catalog to define an initial input media set;

(c) for each item of the initial input media set, generating at least one navigation list based on the co-concurrency metric values;

(d) communicating the generated navigation list to the user;

(e) receiving from the user an instruction to edit the navigation list;

(f) editing the navigation list as instructed by the user to define a new input set;

(g) for each item of the new input media set, generating a new navigation list based on the co-concurrency metric values; and

(h) communicating the new navigation list to the user.

2. The method according to claim 1 wherein said editing step includes adding a user-selected media item to the initial input media set to define the new input set.

3. The method according to claim 1 wherein said editing step includes:

receiving from the user a selection of at least one media item on the navigation list for deletion; and

deleting the user-selected media item from the initial input media set to form the new input set.

4. The method according to claim 1 wherein said communicating step comprises communication over a network for displaying the navigation list on a remote client device.

5. The method according to claim 1 including generating a plurality of different navigation lists based on the metric values.

6. The method according to claim 1 and further comprising ordering the generated navigation list according to values of the selected metric for the media items on the list.

7. The method according to claim 1 and further comprising limiting the generated navigation list to a predetermined maximum number of media items.

8. The method according to claim 7 wherein the maximum number of media items per list is determined by setup parameters.

9. The method according to claim 1 wherein the user comprises a remote software process rather than a person.

10. The method according to claim 1 including repeating steps (e) through (h) to realize an interactive browsing session.

11. The method according to claim 1 wherein the catalog media items comprise recorded music tracks.

12. The method according to claim 11 wherein the co-concurrency metric values include at least one of a pre-concurrency metric, a post-concurrency metric, and a combination of the foregoing metrics applied transitively.

13. A computer-readable storage medium having computer-readable program code stored therein, said computer-readable program code including:

computer-readable program code for receiving a selection of a catalog for user browsing and for accessing a collection of metric data associated with the selected catalog;

wherein the metric data comprises metric values for pairs of media items derived from a knowledge base of mediasets;

wherein the metric values reflect a level of co-concurrency for each of the pairs of media items within the knowledge base of mediasets; and further wherein the co-concurrency metric values indicate, for each pair of media items (i,j), how many times item i and item j appear together within any of the mediasets of the knowledge base, so that the co-concurrency metric values are not affected by any descriptor, characteristic, rating, classification or attribute of the media items' content;

computer-readable program code for receiving from the user an initial selection of at least one media item from the selected catalog to define an initial input media set;

computer-readable program code for generating a navigation list based on selected metrics for each item of the initial input media set; and

computer-readable program code for communicating the generated navigation list to the user.

14. A computer-readable storage medium according to claim 13 and further comprising:

computer-readable program code for editing the initial input media set responsive to user feedback; and then generating a new navigation list based on the edited input media set.

15. A computer-readable storage medium according to claim 14 and further comprising computer-readable program code for communicating the new navigation list to the user or saving the new navigation list as a mediaset for the user.

16. A computer-readable storage medium according to claim 15 wherein the catalog comprises a listing of music media items.

17. A computer-readable storage medium according to claim 15 wherein the catalog comprises meta data identifying music tracks; and the metrics are derived from a knowledge base that includes at least some of the catalog music tracks in the catalog.

18. A method according to claim 1, wherein the co-concurrency metric values are determined by the steps of:

accessing the knowledge base of multiple mediasets, each mediaset comprising a plurality of media items grouped together to form the mediaset;

for each item in a mediaset, identifying every other item in the same mediaset, so as to define all of the pairs of media items in that mediaset;

repeating said identifying step for every other mediaset in the knowledge base, thereby defining every pair of media items that appears together within any individual mediaset in the knowledge base; and

for each identified pair of media items, calculating a value of a co-concurrency metric that reflects how many times the identified pair of media items appear together within a mediaset in the knowledge base, and said calculating step comprises incrementing the co-concurrency metric value responsive to every additional occurrence of the same pair of items in the knowledge base.

19. The method according to claim 18 wherein:

the media items are ordered within the mediasets in the knowledge base;

said identifying step includes defining ordered pairs of items that appear in any mediaset in the knowledge base in the same order;

the selected metric is an ordered concurrency metric, and

said calculating step comprises incrementing the ordered concurrency metric value responsive to every additional occurrence of the same ordered pair of items in the knowledge base.