This introduction is based on Menke & Mehler 2010.
During the last decades, interdisciplinarity has become a central keyword in research. As a consequence, many concepts, theories and scientific methods get in contact with each other, resulting in many different strategies and variants of acquiring, structuring, and sharing data sets. Such a spectrum of representation systems leads to a problem: Researchers regularly need to work with multiple software tools whose data formats are incompatible. While there are solutions of data conversion for a few combinations of data formats (e.g., integration of Praat transcriptions into ELAN annotation documents), this does not hold in general. As an example, body tracking data cannot be added to such a document, since the corresponding tracking software uses a custom data format which cannot be read by either Elan or Praat. This means that there is no single software system exists that can handle both data subsets simultaneously.
The lack of software to fill that gap was a fundamental motivation for the design of the software system developed in Project X1 of the CRC 673 “Alignment in Communication”: The Ariadne Corpus Management System. It has been built around a generic model of dialogical events oriented at central scales. These provide an abstract model of the widespread data spectrum observable in dialogical communication. The data model contains a rich type system that helps to put dialogical events into a well-defined conceptual grid, thus ensuring that data can be handled uniformly in every case. For the various proprietary data formats required by different user groups, porting routines have been designed that map between custom data models and the equivalent data structure in the Ariadne model.
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… about specific features of Ariadne on these pages:
