ECOLM - An Electronic Corpus of Lute Music
The database
The data structures behind ECOLM are designed to give considerable freedom in what sort of information can be given and how. This is, of course, constrained by the need for data to be searchable and machine comprehensible. Often, this makes the database rather more complex than it might be (at last count, there were over 60 ECOLM database tables) It also means that many useful but more human ways of dealing with the data are united in a single clusters concept.
Broadly speaking, there are 6 major, ‘top-level’ data types:
- Sources
- Historical sources
- Pieces
- Single items from a source
- People
- Historical or modern
- Books
- Secondary literature and modern editions
- Articles
- Secondary literature and modern editions
- Clusters
- Groupings of data of different types together
Miscellaneous others include places, dates, etc.