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Linked Open Data for West Nilotic Languages: The NILOMORPH Project

In this paper, we present the NILOMORPH project, that aims at describing the complex non-concatenative morphology of West Nilotic languages and reconstructing the dynamics of its evolution from a more straightforward concatenative system. The project adopts techniques from several methodologies and draws on many kinds of data displaying different formats, tagsets and conventions. Data are also multilingual, documenting different West Nilotic varieties, and multimodal, including also audio and video recordings. This makes the process of integration of these data particularly challenging. We first describe how the data can be converted to standard formats such as CLDF and Paralex, to achieve interoperability between resources of the same kind. We then discuss how they can be modelled as Linguistic Linked Open Data in the Resource Description Framework, reusing already existing vocabularies and defining new classes and properties to meet the needs of the project, to also achieve interoperability between resources of different kinds.