Cartodialect is a web application to visualize and annotate the Linguistic Atlas Of France (ALF). ALF is an influential geo-linguistic dialect atlas of Romance varieties in France, realized by Jules Gilleron et Edmond Edmont between 1897 an 1901. It groups 1920 maps and was published in 13 volumes between 1902 and 1910.
The Cartodialect application is developped by STeamer group in the context of the ANR ECLATS project (ANR -15-CE-380002).
Cartodialect allows to :
- navigate through the ALF maps and visualize them at various zoom level,
- look for specific maps according to various search criteria (name, thematic, …),
- to annotate maps. For each inventory point a dialectologist can enter his own interpretation of the phonetic form found in this location.
- export the annotation data to various spatial analysis tools like ShinyDialect.
Behind the the scene, Cartodialect is based on a knowledge graph implemented in a RDF triplestore. A generic model (in the form of an OWL ontology) for geo-linguistic atlases has been defined and was instanciated for the ALF. This knowledge graph can be accessed and queried through a SPARQL end-point. Data can be linked to other data sources (for example the 639 ALF survey points are linked to corresponding DBpedia and genonames resources) and reversly other data sources can link to cartodialect resources.
Cartodialect is used on a daily basis by dialectologists working on the ALF. You can access the application through the url http://cartodialect.imag.fr