The tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués. A galician and portuguese word bank

The international project Tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués (Thesaurus of the Galician and Portuguese heritage lexicon) aims to be a cross-dialectal lexical portal bringing together lexicographical material from Brazil, Galicia and Portugal in a single computer tool. This dialect portal will give direct access via Internet, free of charge, to a large body of lexicographical data much of which has until now remained unpublished and hard for researchers obtain. The lexical information in the Tesouro is fully lemmatized, semantically classified and geographically referenced, making it possible to obtain usefully grouped search results and generating a map representation corresponding to each data set. Besides its obvious value to dialect researchers and lexicographers, the Tesouro will also provide useful material for the study of names, historical linguistics, etymology, morphology and so on. This tool might also be exploited in ethnographical and historical research since it makes available to the scientific community a large amount of information about the inherited traditions, both material and immaterial, of all three countries, much of which is endangered on account of recent changes in traditional ways of life.