The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

WALS Online is about making the data of the World Atlas of Language Structures accessible - as widely as possible.

To most users the site's HTML pages will be all the access to the data they care about, but for people who want to work with the data quantitatively a more comprehensive access to the data is necessary.

The Raw Power

For those wanting to unleash the raw power of SQL, we provide the WALS Online SQLite database - the one the web application runs on - for download.

The easiest way we found to work with this database is to use SQLite Manager, a Firefox browser add-on.

The screenshot below shows SQLite Manager with the WALS db loaded, and languages located north of the polar circle - i.e. with a latitude greater than 66.5° - selected.

Power to the Masses

Now SQL isn't everyone's first choice for manipulating data; Spreadsheet processors like ms excel or openoffice calc may come closer to that. So since last week, we also provide (most of) the WALS
data in a ZIP archive of Delimiter-separated values for download.

Data formatted this way can be easily imported into spreadsheet processors, just make sure to pick the correct character encoding for your platform.

And to the Mapmakers

To include the feature data from WALS in maps, we provide also several exports, explained below in descending order of flexibility.

Single Feature Values as GeoRSS

As announced before,
GeoRSS for single values of features are available using the following (somewhat bolted-on) URL syntax. To retrieve the feed for the first value of feature 2:

http://wals.info/feature/2?tg_format=georss

To retrieve other values, you must pass parameters to set the preceding values to "invisible". So the URL below will give the feed for the third value:

http://wals.info/feature/2?tg_format=georss&v1=a000&v2=a000

GeoRSS is easy to include as layer on maps created with OpenLayers.

Complete Features as KML

With URLs like

http://wals.info/feature/2?tg_format=kml

you can export a feature's datapoints in KML format, suitable for
import in Google Earth.

Features as Mapplets

To add a WALS feature as overlay to a Google map, you can install
the mapplet
by following the "mapplet" link on the feature's map page.

Yesterday we rolled out some new functionality for WALS Online. Most notable:

• Geographic coordinates are now displayed on language pages (e.g. Quiché).
• Custom icon selections on feature values pages are now stored in cookies in the user's browser. This allows retrieving the last selection even when navigating to a values page using the browser's back button. A link above the icon size control allows resetting custom selections to the defaults.
• A special css style for print should make the experience of printing maps from WALS Online a lot better. Let us know about the results on various platforms.
• Author names are now linked to the corresponding entry in the authors page, which we hope to enrich with information over time.

Less notable - in the sense of harder to notice:

• Most pages are now XHTML 1.0, which allows us to include ...
• ... metadata in RDFa. We haven't included a lot of metadata yet - mainly because of the experimental nature of the whole mechanism, so we'd like to hear whether this is already useful by now.
• GeoRSS for feature values; the datapoints for each value of a feature are syndicated as GeoRSS feeds, which - among other things - allows to easily include them as layers in an OpenLayers application. We have put together an example of such an integration. (Note that the pages under "experimental" may not be stable.)

Last night, from July 7, 9:00 pm CEST until July 8, 0:30 am CEST our server was not reachable, due to maintenance work on the infrastructure of the Wissenschaftspark Golm which connects our servers to the internet.

The location for Malacca Creole has been corrected. Find the details here.

The values for feature 33 (Coding of Nominal Plurality) of the following languages will be corrected in the next edition of WALS Online:

• Berber (Siwa): Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural
• Mondunga: Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural
• Päri: Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural
• Pokot: Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural
• Berta: Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural
• Lagwan: Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural
• Coos (Hanis): Plural suffix -> Mixed morphological plural