LiDo RDF: From a Relational Database to a Linked Data Graph of Linguistic Terms and Bibliographic Data

Forty years ago the linguist Dr. Christian Lehmann developed a framework for documenting linguistic terms, concepts and bibliographic data that resulted in the LiDo Terminological and Bibliographical Database (LiDo TBD). Since 2006 students and linguistic researchers benefit from the data by looking it up on the Web. Even though, the LiDo TBD is implemented as a relational database, its underlying framework aims at yielding a terminological network containing data nodes that are connected via specific relation edges in order to create an interrelated data graph. Now, with the emergence of Semantic Web technologies we were able to implement this pioneering work by converting the LiDo TBD relational database into a Linked Data graph. In this paper we present and describe the creation of the LiDo RDF dataset and introduce the LiDo RDF project. The goals of this project are to enable the direct use and reuse of the data both for the scientific research community and machine processing alike as well as to enable a valuable enrichment of already existing linguistic terminological and bibliographic data by including LiDo RDF in the LLOD cloud.