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<p class="lead">Helping collect the world's language diversity heritage.</p>
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<p>
    The Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project is developing and curating interoperable data
    publication structures using Linked Data principles as integration mechanism for distributed
    resources.
</p>

<p>This philosophy allows for</p>

<ul>
<li>small-scale efforts to publish individual databases like <a href="https://wals.info">WALS</a> (World Atlas of Language Structures) or <a href="http://wold.clld.org">WOLD</a> (World Loanword Database), thereby preserving the brands established by these projects, </li>
<li>while at the same time facilitating a unified user experience across publications.</li>
</ul>

<p>
    Within the project, this approach is applied to publishing lexical and grammatical
    databases already compiled at the <a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de">MPI-EVA</a> and elsewhere.
    This has led to a <a href="https://github.com/clld/clld">software framework</a> which can be
    used to develop database journals, i.e. edited collections of databases submitted by linguists from around the
    world.
</p>

<p>
    A list of databases implemented as <a href="https://github.com/clld/clld">clld</a> applications
    and published on the CLLD platform is available following the <a href="datasets.html">Datasets</a> link.
</p>

<p>
    <a href="https://dictionaria.clld.org">Dictionaria</a> &mdash; a journal of dictionaries of less widely studied languages,
    edited by Martin Haspelmath &amp; Barabara Stiebels &mdash; which runs on the clld framework has already published 10 dictionaries.
</p>

<p>
    For the purposes of linking linguistic data uniquely to languages, language codes are needed
    for each language and each variety. For this reason, the CLLD project also comprises:</p>

<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://glottolog.org">Glottolog</a> (catalog of all languages, families and dialects, with comprehensive reference information), edited by Harald Hammarström, Martin Haspelmath &amp; Robert Forkel</li>
</ul>


<h3>CLLD and CLDF</h3>

<p>
    Arguably the most important outcome of the CLLD project was the specification of the
    <a href="https://cldf.clld.org">CLDF standard</a>. CLDF provides a standard and guidelines to
    store linguistic datasets as interrelated plain text files, facilitating
</p>
<ul>
    <li>longterm archiving and FAIR access to such datasets via repositories like Zenodo,</li>
    <li>a standardized submission format for journals such as Dictionaria,</li>
    <li>simplified creation of clld applications from CLDF module-specific blueprints.</li>
</ul>

<p>
    Using CLDF datasets as "input" for clld applications also solves one of the bigger problems of
    publishing data in a web application: How to handle multiple versions of the data?
    With CLDF, datasets can be versioned and multiple version can be published in a repository
    while the web application is relegated to a browsable interface of the latest published version.
</p>