Distributed tasking in ontology mediated integration of typological databases for linguistic research

Developing a unified interface for typological databases with diverse theoretical perspectives of certain crosslinguistic phenomena poses problems for ontology-mediated integration, where multiple potentially theory-specific concepts need to be associated. This paper outlines a bidirectional approach to unbiased domain conceptualization and unification of database notions. At the global level, we describe the use of ontology for effective domain specification. At the local level we are concerned with an appropriate unification description, called Data Transformation Language (DTL), containing rules for normalization of values and the addition of semantic structures. The complete approach is justified and illustrated with a partial case study taken from the Typological Database System (TDS) project.