lemon-tree: Representing Topical Thesauri on the Semantic Web

An increasing number of dictionaries are represented on the Web in the form of linguistic linked data using the lemon vocabulary. Such a representation facilitates interoperability across linguistic resources, has the potential to increase their visibility, and promotes their reuse. Lexicographic resources other than dictionaries have thus far not been the main focus of efforts surrounding lemon and its modules. In this paper, fundamental needs are analysed for representing topical thesauri specifically and a solution is provided for two important areas hitherto problematic: (1) levels that can be distinguished in their topical system and (2) a looser form of categorization than lexicalization. The novel lemon-tree model contains terminology to overcome these issues and acts as bridge between existing Web standards in order to bring topical thesauri, too, to the Semantic Web