The Ontology of Bulgarian Dialects Architecture and Information Retrieval
Following a concise description of the structure, the paper focuses on the potential of the Ontology of the Bulgarian Dialects, which demonstrates a novel usage of the ontological modelling for the purposes of dialect digital archiving and information processing. The ontology incorporates information on the dialects of the Bulgarian language and includes data from 84 dialects, spoken not only on the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria, but also abroad. It encodes both their geographical distribution and some of their main diagnostic features, such as the different mutations (also referred to as reflexes) of some of the Old Bulgarian vowels. The mutations modelled so far in the ontology include the reflex of the back nasal vowel /o/ under stress, the reflex of the back er vowel under stress, and the reflex of the yat vowel /e/ under stress when it precedes a syllable with a back vowel. Besides the opportunity for formal structuring of the considerable amount of data gathered through the years by dialectologists, the ontology also provides numerous possibilities for information retrieval searches by dialect, country, dialect region, city or village, various combinations of diagnostic features.
LREC