  Annotated speech corpora are databases consisting of signal data along with
time-aligned symbolic `transcriptions'. Such databases are typically
multidimensional, heterogeneous and dynamic. These properties present a number
of tough challenges for representation and query. The temporal nature of the
data adds an additional layer of complexity. This paper presents and harmonises
two independent efforts to model annotated speech databases, one at Macquarie
University and one at the University of Pennsylvania. Various query languages
are described, along with illustrative applications to a variety of analytical
problems. The research reported here forms a part of several ongoing projects
to develop platform-independent open-source tools for creating, browsing,
searching, querying and transforming linguistic databases, and to disseminate
large linguistic databases over the internet.
