LEMON for lexical senses. The Lexicon Model for Ontologies vocabulary (LEMON) has been designed to capture lexicons and to add their lexicographical knowledge to ontologies in the Semantic Web.51 The vocabulary has seen a number of updates and was published as a stable W3C vocabulary in May 2016.52 This finalized version has since been adopted by a number of bodies, including the Global WordNet Association, to represent and link existing lexical resources on the Semantic Web.53 It is this particular version that the name LEMON will henceforth be used to indicate. LEMON consists of a number of modules. The core module, called OntoLex, contains terminology that is the most relevant for historical language thesauri. The main terms in this module are those for lexical entries (LexicalEntry), lexical senses (LexicalSense), forms (Form), and lexical concepts (LexicalConcept). Reminiscent of dictionaries – and in line with historical language thesauri – a lexical entry has one or more lexical senses and grammatical realizations, or forms. In order to organize lexical entries and senses not alphabetically but onomasiologically, i.e. by their meaning, it is possible to associate them with lexical concepts that can be organized hierarchically. Lexical concepts in OntoLex are defined as a “mental abstraction, concept or unit of thought that can be lexicalized by a given collection of senses”.54 This definition, not unlike concepts in SKOS, appears highly suitable to express categories from historical language thesauri. In fact, lexical concepts from OntoLex are asserted to be specializations of SKOS concepts. The approach outlined in this chapter to use SKOS for the topical system of thesauri is therefore 49See Chapter 5, which introduces lemon-tree, a data vocabulary that contains terminology for expressing conceptual levels in thesauri. 50OLiA Annotation Model for Uby Parts of Speech. 51McCrae et al., ‘Interchanging Lexical Resources on the Semantic Web’. 52‘Lexicon Model for Ontologies’. 53‘Global Wordnet Formats’. 54‘Lexicon Model for Ontologies’. strengthened by the specification of LEMON, which makes this connection between the data vocabularies explicit. As discussed, the LEMON vocabulary covers fundamental terminology for lexical senses in historical language thesauri and their relation to concepts. Next to coverage, the criteria for cohesion and standardization are also met by LEMON. Firstly, the asserted connection with SKOS enables cohesion 121 and increases standardization and int...
