The advantages of having compatible lexical databases are that we would be able to adapt tools developed for other databases for the analysis of our own database, for the search in sign language vocabulary etc. The easiest to overcome compatibility problem probably consists in the different record structure and field definitions of different databases. Once the structure has been published and is defined transparently the data needed can be converted to another database which has a different record structure. Thomas Hanke has written a paper for the Signing Books project which illustrates how complex this problem is. He demonstrates it for the apparently trivial aspect of country names and language names.
Data entries The problem of incompatibilities is continued for the data entries.
Thus the range of information covered is differently. This is not very problematic, were not the kind and type of information also different which is the case when glosses are following different conventions. Glossing Most glossing conventions use special characters, a mixture of alphabetical and graphical symbols. This task of converting glossing into a common 7-bit notation is in principle possible and may find a not too difficult solution, whereas the task of converting different transcription notation systems cannot be solved completely. But this problem is easier to solve than the next one.