The ALSWEB Framework: a Web-based Framework for the Linguistic Atlas ofSicily Project

In this work the ALSWEB framework is presented.The ALSWEB is a virtual linguistic laboratory forlinguistic research developed as a web application. The purposeof the framework is to model the entire process regardingthe different steps of data acquisition, data transformation,information acquisition from different data and research hypothesesverification in the ALS (Linguistic Atlas of Sicily)project. The nature of the ALS research involves differenttype of data. The socio-linguistic researcher that is the mainactor of the proposed framework has to acquire information inmany formats: multimedia data, audio data, question-answer(textual) from particular questionnaires. In this work theoverall framework is presented and the major issues in thedefinition of a complex web-based framework are explained.The produced results are very valuable for linguists workingon Linguistic Atlas of Sicily, and they are used to generatestatistics on linguistic phenomena and geographical location.The obtained results are very encouraging in the successof an hybridization between different scientific and culturaldomains pertaining to the project in order to participate tothe constitution of the core of a local humanities computingcommunity.