Visualizing Toponym Clusters on an Interactive Map

Toponymic research [1] shows that by grouping place names according to their deriva-tional similarity and studying their geographical distribution, one can sometimes infer where peoples speaking different languages (and therefore partial to corresponding derivational patterns) live or used to live. This claim has been proved valid for some languages with rich morphology, including Russian. Yet it is nearly impossible to draw any sort of conclu-sions when the toponyms and their groupings are not visualized graphically, and are only accessible as database entries. Therefore, we have created a visualization tool for those in-vestigating toponym distribution in Russia to facilitate their research, while having a wider range of potential users in mind. The visualization is part of a web application designed to display various datasets of toponyms. The tool consists of an interactive map on which multiple groups of toponyms can be depicted, accompanied by a number of controls for manipulating the data, its repre-sentation on the map, and the map itself. A set of toponyms, to every one of which a formant (i.e., its derivational suffix) was manually assigned, has become a basis for the visualization. It comprises ca. 200 toponym