Perry Roland Creates DTD for the Representation of Music Notation, Leading to the Music Encoding Initiative

In 1999 Perry Roland, a music librarian at the Digital Library Research Group at the University of Virginia, created an XML schema (DTD) for the representation of music notation. Perry presented his initial work at the first conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval in 2000. His paper was called "XML4MIR: Extensible Markup Language for Music Information Retrieval". Eventually  DTD became known as the Music Encoding Initiative, a community-driven effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. 

"MEI closely mirrors work done by text scholars in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and while the two encoding initiatives are not formally related, they share many common characteristics and development practices. The term "MEI", like "TEI", describes the governing organization and the markup language. The MEI community solicits input and development directions from specialists in various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to discuss and define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are then formalized into the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents. This schema is expressed in an XML Schema Language, with RelaxNG being the preferred format. The MEI schema is developed using the One-Document-Does-it-all (ODD) format, a literate programming XML format developed by the Text Encoding Initiative" (Wikipedia article on Music Encoding Initiative, accessed 9-2020).