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The URLs for the superseded genus and family names should redirect properly to the new ones.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

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.

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.

Our editorial policy for WALS Online distinguishes between two kinds of errata.

1. Errata in what we consider the original contribution of WALS, i.e. feature values assigned to languages;
2. Errata in the additional data we present, like bibliographic references, locations of languages, genealogical data, etc.

While errata of the first kind will be collected until a new edition of WALS Online is published (planned every year), errata of the second kind will be fixed right away. We will document these changes in this blog.

Last week we updated the locations of five languages: Cheyenne, Kamaiurá, Shambala, Trumai and Waurá. Find the details here.

A nice visualization of what WALS is about (judging by chapter titles):

Created with Wordle.