The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

We just added links to our authors’ home pages (as far as available) to the WALS authors page. Since these are the kind of links that tend to break over time, let us know if you find a problem.

Since WALS Online is all about Open Access to research data it was only consequential to present a poster at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference, which was held last week in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The geo-coordinates for Zapotec (Isthmus) have been corrected. Find the details here.

You may have noticed or better yet, you haven’t: we switched the WALS blog to a new software, WordPress μ. While I hope this move went without glitches, I’m almost sure it didn’t. So if you spot any problems, let us know.

Unfortunately, all feed URLs have changed. We try to redirect to the appropriate new ones, but probably you will have to update any subscriptions you may have.

With now three big map views in WALS Online (for features, combined features and language families) it was time to unify the user interface for these maps. With this rework we also wanted to enhance the printing experience for WALS Online maps.

Since the easiest way to print WALS Online maps is via screenshots, we wanted to provide more flexibility in rearranging the screen layout of our maps. Now

• you can resize the big maps,
• drag the legend to any position on the screen,
• hide the legend.

We also added the functionality to display a list of languages for a certain set of values to all big maps. Clicking on the number of languages for a certain value in the legend will display this list above the map. Clicking on one of these languages will open the corresponding info window for the language marker on the map.

Notes:

• When resizing the map containers you may have to drag around the map a bit to stipulate loading of the missing map tiles to fill the container.
• Printing of the underlying Google Maps is subject to Google’s permission guidelines.

The following changes of the genealogical data in WALS Online have just been put online:

1. The genus Eastern Saharan has been renamed to Western Saharan.
2. The genus Lule-Vilela has been renamed to Lule.
3. The family Sko has been renamed to Skou and it’s genealogy rearranged:
   • The languages formerly listed under genus Eastern Sko are now listed as languages of the Serra Hills genus (Poko-Rawo, Womo).
   • The languages formerly listed under genus Serra Hills are now listed as languages of genus Western Skou (Dumo, Skou).
   • There is no genus “Eastern Sko(u)” anymore.
   • The language Sko has been renamed to Skou.

The URLs for the superseded genus and family names should redirect properly to the new ones.

For the last couple of months we have been waiting for a domain transfer from the provider with which we initially hosted wals.info to the AEI. Yesterday it finally happened. Unfortunately we only found out about it, because the former provider’s DNS server did not resolve wals.info to our machine’s IP address anymore. So until we got our DNS server configured to resolve wals.info the website was not reachable.

Starting from around 12 pm CEST yesterday, everything should be back to normal.

During the last week I refactored quite a bit of the WALS Online application and while at it, implemented some new functionality.

Some time ago Hans-Jörg Bibiko made me aware of a nuisance in the way feature maps are drawn: The layering of icons was more or less random. So in a first step to remedy this, I made sure icons for the same value are drawn in the same layer and the layers are ordered by decreasing number of associated languages, so that icons for rare feature values will not be hidden. To make the layering completely configurable, the drawing order can now be changed by dragging-and-dropping values in a new control at the bottom of a feature’s values page (as shown in the screenshot from Feature 50).

Another functionality suggested by Hans-Jörg was a bigger map for language families. I implemented this map view as separate page which can be reached from the regular family page, and configured from there as well. As an example, look at the map for the Austro-Asiatic family.

For details about these changes see the complete changeset.

A visitor to wals.info recently informed us that there are no cities on WALS Online maps for Israel. As we currently depend on Google Maps for the base layers of the maps in WALS Online, there was not much we could do about it.

Last week other examples of countries with missing map data coverage in Google Maps made the news, and now it looks as if google is going to act.

Update: Google did act.

You may have noticed that previously the linking from citations in feature descriptions to records in the reference database was not very comprehensive. Part of the reason for this poor linking was that the database did not contain references which are only cited in the chapter texts, but not for any single feature value.

Today we imported 371 new references and inserted more than 1000 new reference links in the feature descriptions. For an example, take a look at the description of feature 108, which got quite a few new links.

Since this process obviously had to be automatic, there’s still a chance for mistakes or oversights. So if you find citations which are not linked to the reference database or reference links which do not work, let us know.