Automatically Linking Dictionaries of Gallo-Romance Languages Using Etymological Information

How could we link together digital dictionaries which have no common lexical units, but deal with the same linguistic area? And how could we do that automatically, in order to ensure that all future updates of these dictionaries are taken into account in the linking process?
This contribution exposes the solutions that we propose in the field of French and Gallo-Romance historical lexicography. The digitalisation currently in progress of a work of scientific reference, i.e. the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW), gives us a mean to link together other dictionaries, such as the Dictionnaire Etymologique de l’Ancien Français (DEAF), the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (DMF), the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND), or the Atlas Linguistique de la Wallonie (ALW), through the use of the references of these dictionaries to the FEW. Concrete examples of linking lexical data are discussed in this context.
We also describe a simple peer-to-peer protocol allowing e-dictionaries to be automatically linked in a distributed way using the references of their articles. An implementation based on a simple REST API is suggested to let teams maintaining different e-dictionaries keep their own technologies and data schema.