An organized set of generic and specialized lexicons

The paper describes the construction of three specialized lexicons organized as databases of a relational type. The databases contain terms belonging to different knowledge fields: the first is a database of maritime terminology (technical-nautical and maritime transport domain) (MDB); in the other two databases terms belonging to the knowledge field of taxation law (TDB) and to the domain of labour law and union labour rules (LDB) are codified. The database of maritime terminology (MDB) was built first, on the basis of the EuroWorNet (EWN) and ItalWordNet (IWN) model, using lexical semantic relations to codify terms, within the framework of the Princeton WordNet (WN) philosophy; it includes about 4000 lemmas. The other two databases (1600 and 1500 lemmas respectively) were structured following similar criteria, in keeping with the methods already successfully experimented to create the MDB and also to enhance it with a subset of terms belonging to the scientific domain of Meteorology, that is an organized set of research phases constituting a true methodology to create terminological databases. These phases are herewith described: i) the corpus approach; ii) the generic database approach. Then the whole terminological network is outlined, highlighting the different kinds of relations linking the terminological and the generic resources.