A Spatio-Temporal Linked Data Representation for Modeling Spatio-Temporal Dialect Data

Collections of linguistic and dialect data often lack a semantic description and the ability to establish relations to external datasets, from e.g. demography, socio-economics, or geography. Based on existing projects-the Database of Bavarian Dialects in Austria and explore AT!-this paper elaborates on a spatio-temporal Linked Data model for representing linguistic/dialect data. Here we focus on utilizing existing data and publishing them using a virtual RDF graph. Additionally, we exploit external data sources like DBPedia and geonames.org, to specify the meaning of dialect records and make use of stable geographical placenames. In the paper we highlight a spatio-temporal modeling and representation of linguistic records relying on the notion of a discrete lifespan of an object. Based on a real-world example-using the lemma "Karotte" (engl. carrot) we show how the usage of a specific dialect word ("Karottn") changes from 1916 until 2016-by exploiting the expressive power of GeoSPARQL.