Since the start of the project, we have modified and enlarged the scope of our data. Changes and updates have been made as ongoing work allows, but this method of piecemeal updates has led to an increasingly de-normalized production of data.

The Need to Support a Browsing Interface
The project team has decided that the WEME database should be accessible to interested scholars outside the project and to the public. Changes currently being made to the database are intended to provide the basis for a web-based browsing interface. For this, a data model that will allow a greater variety of browsing and linking than originally anticipated is required.

Given a changing data model, changing use cases, and a changing technology stack, the required modifications to the database schema are substantial. The basic principle guiding the schema development remains the same. The WEME database expresses a model in which attributes of people (and magical beings) are asserted in textual sources. The basic notion is not to model what happened, as though this could simply be recovered, but instead to model what various texts say happened.

The Assertion entity is the central mechanism for relating data about people, events, magical beings, and locations to the textual sources in which these things are attested. The new schema will support project members in providing more flexible modeling of significant features from the text. This new design should also support the widest variety of entry points into and pathways through the collected data.