Keynote Talk

Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua

Digital Geolinguistics: on the use of Linked Open Data for Data-Level Interoperability between geolinguistic resources

The Open Language Archives Community which recently celebrated its first 10 years of activity, is a worldwide network dedicated to collecting information on language resources and developing standard protocols for interoperability. Digital Geolinguistic systems encourage collaboration between linguists, historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, as they explore the relationship between language and cultural adaptation and change. However, the heterogeneity of geolinguistic projects has been recognized as a key problem limiting the reusability of linguistic tools and data collections.

We present and approach which moves the focus from the systems handling the linguistic data to the data themselves. For this purpose the Linked Open Data paradigm is very promising, because it eases interoperability between different systems by allowing the definition of data-driven models and applications. As a concrete example, we present a geolinguistic application build upon a real linguistic dataset which provides linguists with a system for investigating variations among closely related languages.