CLLD – Cross-Linguistic Linked Data

Glottolog 2.3 is out and a minor update of WALS

posted Friday, July 04, 2014 by Robert Forkel

Last week has seen updates for two of our flagship datasets: Glottolog (our comprehensive language catalog and bibliography) and WALS Online (the World Atlas of Language Structures Online).

Glottolog 2.3

While we would like to stick to a quarterly update schedule for Glottolog, last week's update was in fact the first one in 2014. Thus it incorporated quite a few corrections proposed to the editors over the last months. An overview of the changes is given in Glottolog's new News section. We also included bibliographical records for ISO 639-3 change requests as references in Glottolog.

In addition to the updated dataset, this Glottolog release includes some new functionality.

New tree view
The old visualization of a languoids classification was difficult to navigate; in particular it was not possible to compare a given languoid to others in different branches of the same family tree. This problem has been addressed by a new tree view (see for example the page for the language Abure).
Flexible language maps
It is now possible to display the languages from the language index on map, respecting any filter criteria currently applied to the table. To do so, click the download button on top of the table and select the format map.html. E.g. this map shows all languages in an area of the world bounded by the geographical latitudes 10° to 20° and longitudes 10° to 30°.
Country maps:
A special case of the language maps are maps for languages spoken in a particular country. To display such a map, select a country from the languoid search form and hit submit. As an example this map shows all languages spoken in Papua New Guinea.

WALS Online

Compared to the changes in Glottolog, the update of WALS was rather minor. For a list of changes, see the corresponding issues on GitHub. Following our distinction between WALS core data and auxiliary data, changes in datapoints (i.e. in the coding of languages for features) are traceable from the datapoint pages (e.g. Datapoint Latvian / Tea), while for information like language classification we only display the current state.

License
  Project on