The Austronesian and the Micronesian Comparative Dictionaries as CLDF datasets

The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary has served as an important resource for the comparative study of Austronesian languages since Robert Blust started its compilation in 1990. Likewise, the Micronesian Comparative Dictionary - an online database of Proto-Micronesian Reconstructions previously published in Oceanic Linguistics by Byron Bender and colleagues - is an important reference point for comparative Linguistics. The legacy, online versions of both dictionaries share an uncertain future, and both have not been available in a structured format, amenable to quantitative methods. Thus, to preserve the content of both dictionaries for the scientific record and to increase interoperability of the data, we undertook a conversion of the dictionaries to CLDF datasets. While programmatic access to the data within each dictionary already provides a new level of usability, the true potential of data in CLDF lies in interoperability across datasets. This is particularly useful for the two dictionaries presented here, because Micronesian languages belong to the Austronesian family and so the Micronesian data could potentially complement the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary. With the CLDF datasets we lay the groundwork for tackling this challenge.