In this paper, we discuss the requirements that a long lasting linguistic database should have in order to meet the needs of the linguists together with the aim of durability and sharing of data. In particular, we discuss the generalizability of the Syntactic Atlas of Italy, a linguistic project that builds on a long standing tradition of collecting and analyzing linguistic corpora, on a more recent project that focuses on the synchronic and diachronic analysis of the syntax of Italian and Portuguese relative clauses. The results that are presented are in line with the FLaReNet Strategic Agenda that highlighted the most pressing needs for research areas, such as Natural Language Processing, and presented a set of recommendations for the development and progress of Language resources in Europe.

Syntactic comparison across languages is essential in the research field of linguistics, e.g. when investigating the relationship among closely related languages. In IR and NLP, the syntactic information is used to understand the meaning of word occurrences according to the context in which their appear. In this paper, we discuss a mathematical framework to compute the distance between languages based on the data available in current state-of-the-art linguistic databases. This framework is inspired by approaches presented in IR and NLP.