Heterogeneity in focus: creating and using linguistic databases

The papers in this volume were presented at the workshop `Heterogeneity in Linguistic Databases', which took place on July 9, 2004 at the University of Potsdam. The workshop was organized by project D1: `Linguistic Database for Information Structure: Annotation and Retrieval', a member project of the SFB 632, a collaborative research center entitled `Information Structure: the Linguistic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts'. The workshop brought together both developers and users of linguistic databases from a number of research projects which work on an empirical basis, all of which have to cope with different sorts of heterogeneity: primary linguistic data and annotated information may be heterogeneous, as well as the data structures representing them. The first four papers (by Wagner, Schmidt, Lüdeling, and Witt) address aspects of heterogeneous data from the point of view of database developers; the remaining three papers (by Meyer, Smith, and Teich/Fankhauser) focus on data exploitation by the users.