Linguistic Resources Enhanced with Geospatial Information

In this short report on language data and RDF tools, we describe the transformation process that we undertook to convert spreadsheet data about a group of endangered languages and where they are spoken in West Africa into an RDF triple store. We use RDF tools to organize and visualize these data on a world map, accessible through a web browser. The functionality we develop allows researchers to see where these languages are spoken and to query the language data. This type of development not only showcases the power of RDF, but it provides a powerful tool for linguists trying the solve the mysteries of the genealogical relatedness of the Dogon languages.