OntoLex

OntoLex is a family of ontologies for representing lexical resources on the Semantic Web. It originated as an extension of the Lemon model and provides a modular framework for encoding dictionaries, glossaries, and other lexical databases in RDF and OWL. The core concepts include LexicalEntry, LexicalSense, and LexicalForm, with relationships that connect a lexical entry to its senses and each sense to its linguistic representations in one or more languages. The model also supports multilingual glosses and translations, and it is designed to facilitate linking lexical data to domain ontologies and to other lexical resources.

OntoLex-Lemon is designed as a modular specification that combines the Lemon core with OntoLex extensions to represent translations, sense relations, and metadata about lexical resources. This structure enables publishing interoperable lexicons that can be queried, merged, and aligned with ontologies used in particular domains. The standard is expressed in RDF/OWL and is intended to work with common Semantic Web tooling and datasets, enabling cross-resource discovery of words and meanings.

Applications include publishing dictionaries as Linked Data, supporting multilingual natural language processing, and enabling cross-lingual information retrieval. By linking senses to domain concepts and to other lexical resources, OntoLex supports alignment with resources such as WordNet and with domain ontologies. The OntoLex community continues to maintain and evolve the set of ontologies to reflect linguistic practice and interoperability needs, and the approach has seen broad adoption in academic and language-technology projects. See also Lemon, LexInfo, Semantic Web, RDF.