The aim of the application is to visualize - in one graph - the etymology of all words deriving from the same ancestor. Users can expand/collapse the tree to visualize what they are interested in. The textual part attached to the graph can be easily translated in any language and the app would become a multilingual resource. My idea is to use dbnary's extraction-framework (for Wiktionary) and develop a (possibly) smart pre-processing strategy to translate Wiktionary textual etymology into a graph database of etymological relationships.
The database of etymological relationships will be available for the community and can be used as a resource to study the history of languages, how pronunciation evolved through time, and eventually how semantics evolved through time.
The link to the grant proposal is
Feedback from the community is important to receive a grant from the Wikimedia foundation so please leave a feedback there if you are interested in the project.
Thanks a lot!
Ester Pantaleo