C-SALT APIs – Connecting and Exposing Heterogeneous Language Resources

In this paper, we present a strategy for the integration of existing heterogeneous language resources like texts and dictionaries by connecting these resources and making them available for internal projects and third party applications through APIs. We describe our approach in the context of the C-SALT (Cologne South Asian Languages and Texts http://c-salt.uni- koeln.de/) initiative, where projects and resources hosted at the University of Cologne covering South Asian languages are presented. To illustrate the potential use of our setup, we first introduce VedaWeb, a web-based platform that provides access to ancient Indian texts written in Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest form of ancient Indo-Aryan. Then we describe the C-SALT APIs for Dictionaries (https://api.c-salt.uni-koeln.de/). These APIs make several large Pāli and Sanskrit dictionaries available. Building on that, we present the architecture behind these APIs and finally we summarize by analyzing the potential role of APIs in Digital Humanities projects.