Lexicography and the Semantic Web. In his discussion on the exploitation of dictionary data, Xxxxx XxXxxxxxx not only addresses the question of why and how one would want to access such data for further computation, but also what an appropriate digital form would be to achieve such ends. He notes: “It makes sense to adopt a single formalism—if not RDF/OWL, then certainly a model that can be readily converted to and from RDF/OWL”.11 One of the arguments in favour of this formalism is that lexicographical works, XxXxxxxxx notes, have graph- like characteristics.12 Lexical senses, for instance, can be seen as nodes of such a graph, connected through such relations as hyponymy and synonymy. By expressing these characteristics in an information graph, the utility of the captured knowledge is enhanced for machine processing.13 That RDF/OWL is seen as the “standard formalism for information graphs” – and many linguistic 7Wilkinson et al., ‘The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship’. 8See the section ‘Creation of the Thesaurus’ of TOE4.
