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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<!-- Required meta tags -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no">
<title>SIMSSA Database</title>
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<body>
<header>
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<nav class="navbar navbar-expand-md navbar-dark bg-dark">
<span class="navbar-brand text-secondary"> SIMSSA Database </span>
</nav>
</header>
<main role="main"
class="content container pt-5">
<h1>Welcome to the SIMSSA Database!</h1>
<br>
<p>
The SIMSSA Database is designed as a repository and discovery tool for
symbolic music files (e.g. <a href="https://music-encoding.org/">MEI</a>,
<a href="https://www.humdrum.org/rep/kern/">Kern</a>, MusicXML, and MIDI).
Users can browse existing files or upload their own. The current site is a
prototype that is still under development. It serves as part of the
<a href="https://simssa.ca/">SIMSSA Project</a>,
a SSHRC Partnership Grant. The SIMSSA Database is the successor of
an older database created as part of <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/music/julie-e-cumming">Julie Cumming</a>’s Digging into
Data grant, designed to gather symbolic music files in one place to do
computer-aided counterpoint analysis. The new database has made improvements
in several areas, explained below.
</p>
<br>
<h3>Modelling Bibliographic Metadata for Music </h3>
<p>
Our data model was first presented in 2017 as
<a href="http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~cmckay/papers/musictech/mckay17database.pdf">
“A database model for computational music research” </a>(McKay et al., 2017).
The model is fairly complex, designed to handle all the different kinds of music
items that we might need to catalog — from prints to manuscripts and even
recordings in the future. Since the original presentation, it has evolved in
response to our development and testing process, but the basic premise of
extensive support for all the different forms of music items remains key to our
model. We’ve referred to library standards for bibliographic metadata such as
the <a href="https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11412">IFLA-LRM</a>
as well as <a href="http://www.rism.info/community/muscat.html">RISM‘s Muscat
</a>. We also use controlled vocabularies for some fields, so the user is
presented with suggested vocabulary -- for example, we use the
<a href="https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCMPT/freelcmpt.html">Library
of Congress Medium of Performance thesaurus</a> for voices and instruments.
We also pull in information about composers from <a href="https://viaf.org/">
VIAF</a>. Users can override the suggestions and add a new entry; we want to
balance quality of data with flexibility. We are working towards adding URIs
to our data to structure our work in a linked-data friendly way.
</p>
<br>
<h3>Tracking Provenance</h3>
<p>
The database allows users to enter an immediate source — a URL or book title,
for example — as well as one “parent” source. Modelling more complex
hierarchies is a future goal, as well as being able to relate sources to other
sources. Another part of provenance is keeping track of who did what when. We have
entities for tracking how different file types are encoded, as well
as validation which can track verifying the quality of files and can include
details about workflow or reliability (For more on the methodology for building
a good corpus, see
<a href="http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~cmckay/papers/musictech/cumming18methodologies.pdf">
Cumming et al, 2018</a>.
We also make it possible to record information about software used to encode
symbolic files (e.g., a MusicXML file exported from
<a href="https://musescore.org/en">Musescore</a>).
</p>
<br>
<h3>Searching Musical Content</h3>
<p>
The SIMSSA DB uses Cory McKay‘s <a href="http://jmir.sourceforge.net/jSymbolic.html">
jSymbolic</a> software to allow content-based search of all the files in the
database.
When a piece is entered in the database, we automatically used jSymbolic to
extract the musical features. This allows users to search for musical content
as defined by jSymbolic features — aspects such as range, the presence of
certain intervals, or other patterns. Users can also combine metadata and
content search.
</p>
<br>
<h3>Archiving Research</h3>
<p>
It takes a lot of time to build a research corpus and ensure that everything
is high quality, so we want to be sure we get to keep it, both for our own
future use and for others who may wish to reproduce our results or conduct
their own studies. While datasets are being built and edited, they go in
<a href="https://github.com/ELVIS-Project/mass-duos-corpus-josquin-larue">
GitHub</a>.
This allows us to track changes and collaborate really easily, and prevents
things from getting lost in Google Drive. SIMSSA DB is great for finished
corpus, storing related features, making it discoverable, and conducting
searches, but for citation purposes we need something even more robust.
We are working towards using <a href="https://zenodo.org/">Zenodo</a>
for “release quality” datasets to cite in papers. Zenodo is an open-access
repository run by the folks responsible for <a href="https://home.cern/">
CERN</a> and allows us to generate a <a href="https://www.doi.org/">DOI</a>
for a stable, citeable dataset.
</p>
<br>
<h3>Developing the Database on GitHub</h3>
<p>
You can view our progress on our GitHub repository
<a href="https://github.com/ELVIS-Project/simssadb">here</a>, and see our
developer documentation
<a href="https://elvis-project.github.io/simssadb/html/index.html">here</a>.
</p>
<br>
</main>
<footer class="footer">
<hr>
<div class=" container d-flex justify-content-center">
<nav class="nav nav-pills flex-column flex-sm-row">
<a class="flex-sm-fill text-sm-center nav-link"
href="http://mcgill.ca"
target="_blank">McGill
University</a>
<a class="flex-sm-fill text-sm-center nav-link"
href="http://www.mcgill.ca/music/"
target="_blank">Schulich School of Music</a>
<a class="flex-sm-fill text-sm-center nav-link"
href="http://www.cirmmt.org"
target="_blank">CIRMMT</a>
<a class="flex-sm-fill text-sm-center nav-link"
href="http://simssa.ca"
target="_blank">SIMSSA</a>
<a class="flex-sm-fill text-sm-center nav-link"
href="http://elvisproject.ca"
target="_blank">ELVIS Project</a>
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