Managing data in TerraLing, a large-scale cross-linguistic database of morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns.

TerraLing (http://terraling.com/) is a database-backed web application set up to collect, store and explore data for comparative research in the linguistic sciences. TerraLing is publicly accessible and open-ended: new languages, contributors, properties and databases can be added so as to allow the database to grow over time. Its basic setup allows working with linguists who are native speakers or signers as language-experts providing the data. This gives researchers the opportunity to use the tools of theoretical linguistics to access the implicit knowledge of native speakers/signers to probe the cross-linguistic situation.