The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

A frequent visitor to WALS Online suggested a new feature: It would be useful if the WALS language search was available as FireFox search plugin – i.e. if you type language names into your browser’s search box and go to WALS Online for the search results.

The way this can be achieved is via OpenSearch, a standard that lets websites communicate their search capabilities to browsers (or other search clients).

You can install the WALS Language Search plugin in FireFox by visiting the WALS website and then clicking on the small arrow next to your browser’s search box. This will open a dropdown list looking like this:

Select Add “Search a Language in WALS” to install the plugin.

Recently we got around to making some of the data in WALS Online available via OAI-PMH. This was done mainly to allow harvesting by OLAC.

For more details about the data we exposed, visit the archive descriptions on OLAC for

• WALS language pages and
• WALS bibliographic data.

Due to a network outage at the Wissenschaftspark Potsdam-Golm where our server is hosted WALS Online could not be reached today, July 10, from around 2:30pm until 6pm GMT.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We try to embed WALS as well as possible in the web. So after adding links to Google Books where appropriate, we had a look at DOIs. Using crossref’s nice OpenURL interface, we managed to find DOIs for 284 of the 780 articles cited in WALS Online.

It should be noted, though, that DOIs do not always point to Open Access content; it is also not generally possible, to link to particular pages of articles accessible via DOI. So we decided to only add the DOI links to the reference database pages and not to individual citations within WALS as we did with the Google Books links.

For an example of the new links, go to the record Agnew and Pike 1957.

We recently found out that Google Books does already cover quite a few of the books cited in WALS; more precisely, almost 10% of all references cited in WALS are available with previews in Google Books.

So we decided to have a try linking where possible:

• From the language lists on feature pages:

  

• From the lists of feature values on language pages:

  

• From info bubbles on maps:

  

But since discovering the links was done automatically, there will be errors. So if you find references which are available on Google Books but not linked, or links to the wrong book, let us know.

To fulfill the test regulations of the Land Brandenburg, the data center where the WALS servers are hosted will have to shut down all facilities in the night from May 8 to May 9. We expect our servers to not be reachable from May 8, 19:00 CET until May 9, 1:00 CET.

We apologize for any inconvenience. Should you encounter problems after the planned downtime, please contact us.

From April 13, 16:58 CEST until this morning, April 14, 7:46 CEST WALS Online was not reachable, due to an unplanned downtime of the network infrastructure of our hosting partner.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

[Update: The network outage was caused by a broken fiber-network-cable.]

The geo-coordinates for Mehri have been corrected – since Mehri is spoken mostly in Yemen, it should be located there. Find the details here. We also added Oman tou the countries where Mehri is spoken.

Today, we got a step further in filling the gap between WALS Online and the printed edition of 2005. We incorporated data to be able to provide a map for Chapter 141 “Writing Systems”.

This can be considered a big step, since it means we can now show additional data for features provided as ground overlay. On the other hand it is only a first step, because there is not yet a mechanism to make this data available for combined features.

So chapter 141 is still a special case, as it is not available for combination, or even for advanced map configuration like choosing marker icons. But we’ll keep on working.

Since we introduced the datapoint specific comments functionality, quite a few new posts to this blog have been created – by exactly this functionality. It turns out that most people just click the “comment” buttons out of curiosity, without actually commenting on a datapoint. While this shouldn’t come as a surprise, it is somewhat unintended and renders the feeds for the blog less useful, because they get cluttered with entries for these automatically created posts.

A solution for this problem may be to subscribe to more selective feeds for the blog. The feed URLs for single categories look like this http://blog.wals.info/category/category-name/feed, e.g. the feed for the “News” category is http://blog.wals.info/category/news/feed

If the rate at which new posts are created due to the new functionality increases notably, we may have to reconsider the current implementation, though. But at less than 10 new posts per day, we’ll keep it as it is, and apologize for any inconvenience.