1 Developing Dictionary Databases as Lexical Data Bases1

We propose to apply classical development methodologies to the design and imple-mentation of Lexical Databases (LDB), which embody conceptual and linguistic knowledge. We represent the conceptual knowledge as an ontology, and the linguistic knowledge, which depends on each language, in lexicons. Our approach is based on a single language-independent ontology. Besides, we study some conceptual and lin-guistic requirements; in particular, meaning classifications in the ontology, focusing on taxonomies. We have followed a classical software development methodology for implementing lexical information systems in order to reach robust, maintainable, and integrateable relational databases (RDB) for storing the conceptual and linguistic knowledge. The result is a methodology to develop information systems for building and querying LDB (SV 02). Based on this methodology, we have developed software tools for authoring and consulting different kinds of linguistic resources: monolin-gual, bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Conventionally, dictionaries are con-ceived for human use and lexical databases are conceived for natural language proc-essing (NLP) applications. Our methodology leads to friendly usable dictionaries, but structurally prepared to be easily embedded in computer applications, as we show along the paper.