Knowledge Discovery and Digital Cartography for the ALS (Linguistic Atlas of Sicily) Project

In this paper the latest developments of the ALS (Linguistic Atlas of Sicily) project are presented. The ALS project has the purpose to define methodologies and tools to allow researches in the socio-linguistic field. Different types of variables (both quantitative and qualitative) are involved. The whole framework is based on the definition of ontology-based applications for the creation, retrieval, manipulation and browsing of related data. To this aim, some mapping processes have been defined. The framework eventually shows the result in many ways including spatial maps. The on-going collaboration process is a perfect example a domain hybridizing process, enabling the training on-the-field of a joint group of researchers who, coming from the peculiarly different scientific and cultural domains pertaining to the project, participate to the constitution of the core of a local humanities computing community.