CLLD – Cross-Linguistic Linked Data

Language Comparison with Linguistic Databases - LanCLiD 2

posted Monday, May 11, 2015 by Robert Forkel

On April 30, just before the big closing conference of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology we hosted the second of what we hope to become a series of workshops on Language Comparison with Linguistic Databases.

The presentations nicely clustered into two thematic categories:

  1. Visualization of linguistic data.
  2. Best practices in database publishing.

In one of the talks in the latter category, Harald Hammarström presented a proposal for an exchange format for cross-linguistic data cldf, which then provided ample opportunity for discussion, which we hope to continue on the mailing list and the cldf repository on GitHub.

Although the talks of the morning session provided a good backdrop for discussions about what kind of data we want to exchange and what kind of tools we may want to exchange it with, it turned out that a lack of clear use cases will impede the development of a format like cldf. So the next weeks will hopefully see some clearer descriptions of such use cases.

In any case, a workshop series like LanCLiD provides the perfect scaffolding for a working group dedicated to standardisation of cross-linguistic data.

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