ECOLM - An Electronic Corpus of Lute Music

The web application

Querying

There are currently three ways of querying the database. It is expected that a further method, allowing direct MySQL SELECT commands, will be added at some future stage. The fields that are searchable using the current query options are also subject to change. We shall be maintaining this documentation in parallel with changes, however, so it to be hoped that the specifications described here are current if not permanent.

The query options are:

Simple: Single-field search by title, person or year
Multiple field: Four fields, with boolean links and more options
Query Builder: Ask compound questions within a pre-set framework

Simple query

This single-field query gives four options:

Piece Name: Searches for matches in Pieces.`Piece Title` and Piece_Names.`PieceName Alias` (i.e. in the title as it appears in the source and in any other names allocated to the piece elsewhere)
Source Name: Searches for matches in Sources.`Source Title` and Source_Names.`SourceName Alias` (i.e. in the title as it appears in the source and in any other names allocated to the piece elsewhere)
Name: Searches for matches in People.`Person Name` and Person_Names.`PersonName Alias`, so including alternative titles or spellings
Year: Searches for sources or pieces that have some form of attempted dating and for which the supplied year may be applicable. It uses some preset constants for how much lattitude to allow for confidence of dating and also for ‘open’ datings such as ‘before 1600’.

Multiple-field query

This query gives six options per search string:

Piece title: Searches for matches in Pieces.`Piece Title` and Piece_Names.`PieceName Alias` (i.e. in the title as it appears in the source and in any other names allocated to the piece elsewhere)
Source title: Searches for matches in Sources.`Source Title` and Source_Names.`SourceName Alias` (i.e. in the title as it appears in the source and in any other names allocated to the piece elsewhere)
Name: Searches for matches in People.`Person Name` and Person_Names.`PersonName Alias`, so including alternative titles or spellings
Year / Year to / Year from: Searches for sources or pieces that have some form of attempted dating and for which the supplied year may be applicable. To and from options allow searching for a range of years

These may be combined using AND or OR from pull-down options. The constants for constraining the way the date search is carried out may also be set. For an explanation of how the ‘Tentative’, ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘started’ and ‘finished’ values are defined, see Dates and Source Dates.

Because this search combines different data types, the output list consists of sources only. If a person’s name was sought, the result will be sources that person had a hand in. If the search gave a piece title and a person’s name, the result will be sources containing a piece with the given title and with which the person was involved.

Query Builder

The query builder and search refiner gives an accessible front end to more complex searching. Here, you can choose from a list of options at every stage, narrowing down the query, presented as an English-language question, until it is ready to be used for searching. These search types are preset in tables in a database and so can be augmented with comparatively little difficulty.

Searches can then be refined further by adding extra English-language questions and attaching them with AND or OR conjunctions (These are currently evaluated from left to right)

ECOLM