OntolexLemon

OntoLex-Lemon is a modular vocabulary for publishing lexical resources on the Semantic Web, designed to represent dictionaries, terminologies, and lexical knowledge in connection with ontologies used in natural language processing. It extends the Lemon Lexicon model with OntoLex modules to provide a standardized representation of lexical entries, forms, and senses, and their relations to concepts in domain ontologies.

The core concepts include LexicalEntry, LexicalForm, and LexicalSense. A LexicalEntry serves as a container for one or more LexicalSenses; LexicalForms capture surface representations such as lemmas and inflected forms, possibly with language tags and orthographic variants; a LexicalSense encodes a specific meaning that may be linked to a concept in an ontology or to a definitional gloss. The model supports multiword expressions, semantic mappings, and glosses in multiple languages. It provides properties to relate entries to forms, senses, and external resources, and to connect senses with ontology concepts and usage examples.

Serialization and interoperability: OntoLex-Lemon data is published as RDF using standard formats such as Turtle, RDF/XML, or JSON-LD. It is designed to interoperate with related vocabularies such as LexInfo for linguistic annotations and SKOS for concept organization. It is commonly used to publish bilingual dictionaries, domain lexicons, and terminology resources, enabling cross-lingual mapping and linking to ontology concepts.

Origin and use: Lemon originated as a generic lexicon model; OntoLex-Lemon was developed by the OntoLex community to support NLP and linked data needs. The standard is widely adopted in research and industry for representing lexical resources on the web and linking textual terms to formal concepts in ontologies.