E-infrastructure projects such as CLARIN do not only make research data available to the scientific community, but also deliver a growing number of web services. While the standard methods for deploying web services using dedicated (virtual) server may suffice in many circumstances, CLARIN centers are also faced with a growing number of services that are not frequently used and for which significant compute power needs to be reserved. This paper describes an alternative approach towards service deployment capable of delivering on demand services in a workflow using cloud infrastructure capabilities. Services are stored as disk images and deployed on a workflow scenario only when needed this helping to reduce the overall service footprint.

In this paper we discuss how linguistic and geographic distances can be related using a 3D visualization. We will convert linguistic data for locations along the German-Dutch border to linguistic distances that can be compared directly to geographic distances. This enables us to visualize linguistic distances as “real” distances with the use of the third dimension available in 3D modelling software. With such a visualization we will test if descriptive dialect data support the hypothesis that the German-Dutch state border became a linguistic border between the German and Dutch dialects. Our visualization is implemented in the 3D modelling software SketchUp.