An ontology for accessing transcription systems

This paper presents the design and implementation of the Ontology for Accessing Transcription Systems (OATS), a knowledge base that supports interoperation over disparate transcription systems and practical orthographies. OATS uses RDF, SPARQL and Unicode to facilitate resource discovery and intelligent search over linguistic data. The knowledge base includes an ontological description of writing systems and relations for mapping transcription system segments to an interlingua pivot, the IPA. It includes orthographic and phonemic inventories from 203 African languages, which were mined from the Web. OATS is motivated by four use cases: querying data in the knowledge base via IPA, querying it in native orthography, error checking of digitized data, and conversion between transcription systems. The model in this paper implements each of these use cases.