Parameters, i.e. the objects described in a CLDF ParameterTable, and relations between them
are often objects of cross-linguistic analysis themselves:
- Implicational universals
can be formulated as dependency graph of grammatical features - the typical parameters of a CLDF
StructureDataset. - CLICS - the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications - computes a network of colexified
concepts - the typical parameters of a CLDF
Wordlist.
Similar to language trees, networks or graphs are hard to inspect without special software. While trees
(or at least their topology) are almost universally serialized using the Newick format, such a clear standard
format is not available for networks. Thus, to make this kind of data available for analysis and reuse in a
standardized way, networks of parameters in a CLDF dataset can be stored in a ParameterNetwork table as
list of edges.
If a mediaReference is used to link to networks or graphs serialized in one of the many file formats
for this, a format that allows discovery of this intent should be prefered. E.g.
GraphML - being namespaced XML - can easily be detected from a
mediaType of text/xml, and the namespace declaration in the XML, while GraphViz' DOT files do not
have such a transparent discovery mechanism (see https://forum.graphviz.org/t/mime-type-for-downloading-dot-files/877).
A parameterEdgeReference property can be used to link rows in CLDF tables to particular edges in
a ParameterNetwork. E.g. a custom table listing individual colexifications, i.e. pairs of word counterparts
for different meanings in a Wordlist, could link each colexification to the edge in the concept network
that is corroborated by the colexfication.
TODO: will be added, once the first datasets using this component are released.
ParameterNetwork: parameter_network.csv
Rows in this table describe edges in a network of parameters.
| Name/Property | Datatype | Cardinality | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ID | string |
singlevalued | A unique identifier for a row in a table. To allow usage of identifiers as path components of URLs IDs must only contain alphanumeric characters, underscore and hyphen. |
| Description | string |
unspecified | A description for an entity. |
| Target_Parameter_ID | string |
unspecified | References the target node of the edge. References Parameter |
| Source_Parameter_ID | string |
unspecified | References the source node of the edge. References Parameter |
| Edge_Is_Directed | boolean |
unspecified | Flag signaling whether the edge is directed or undirected. |