A Multi-Modal Documentation System for Warao

This contribution presents a multi-modal documentation system for the Amerindian culture and language of the Venezuelan Warao. The project has two main tasks: the documentation of language and culture of the Warao and the development of a documentation system. Our key aim is to allow the integration of different media and data types (photos, drawings, file cards, and audio data) in such a fashion that all of them would be first class objects. Furthermore the system has to be usable by ethnolinguistic field workers who are not trained computer scientists and has to guarantee integrability into larger documentation projects as well as data exchange. We therefore opted to use Microsoft Access as the underlying database system and XML as the annotation standard for corpora. One of the key features of the documentation system is an open concept space that allows the free definition of linguistic and cultural concepts and their relations and thus goes beyond the expression of hierarchical relations between concepts.