The project focusses on the Alps as a sole complex regarding the cultural area. It starts from the expectation of common cultural techniques in the whole Alpine region. The adaptation to identical or at least very similar life conditions in the high mountains and with that to the natural spreading of corresponding skills and traditions serves as a basis for this expectation. This common ground becomes manifest linguistically in corresponding designations. Therefore, it is not appropriate to describe the Alpine material culture so to speak top-down in the constricted frame of single language communities (by means of a fix network of survey places in language or dialect regions determined a priori). This approach is mostly a dialectological one aiming at a description as complete as possible of single regions and ideally specific varieties. The perspective of VerbaAlpina, however, exceeds linguistic boundaries and can be called [interlingual linguistic geography]]. In this perspective, diffusion areas of cultural traditions and their linguistic designations shall be uncovered bottom-up, i.e. by accumulating as many local results as possible in an inductive way.<br>
In order to so, VerbaAlpina works exclusively with geocodifiable data and does not specify any extensive categories – apart from the fact that the places belong to the <a href="http://www.alpconv.org/en/convention/default.html" target="_BLANK">Alpine Convention</a>. Extralinguistic data can help to contribute to making the Alpine region's mark as cultural space in case they provide actual or historical information about the social organisation of the inhabitants and/or the opening up by infrastructure and the cultivation of the region. Regarding the historical reconstruction of the Alpine cultural environment it is worth striving for the comparison of areas marked by archaeological persistence with areas of linguistic relics and for the quantitative visualisation of this comparison in the form of a combined mapping; cf. for this <span class="bibl" data-bibl="häuberschütz2004a">Häuber/Schütz 2004a</span> from a general archaeological point of view and the from a more specific point of view the model Cologne city layer atlas (cf. <span class="bibl" data-bibl="häuberschützspiegel1999">Häuber/Schütz/Spiegel 1999</span> and <span class="bibl" data-bibl="häuberua2004">Häuber u.a. 2004</span>).<div id="häuberschütz2004a" style="display: none;"></div><div id="häuberschützspiegel1999" style="display: none;">Häuber, Chrystina/ Schütz, Franz-Xaver/ Spiegel, Maria Elisabeth (1999): Die Entwicklung des Informationssystems Digitaler Archäologischer Schichtenatlas  Köln, Aachen, in: Jakobs, Kai/ Kleefeld, Klaus-Dieter (Hrsg.): Informationssysteme für die Angewandte Historische Geographie, 	RWTH, Lehrstuhl für Informatik</div><div id="häuberua2004" style="display: none;">Häuber, Chrystina (2004): Das Informationssystem Digitaler Archäologischer Schichtenatlas Köln, Essen, in: Horn, Heinz Günter u.a.: Stadtentwicklung und Archäologie, Klartext</div>