Converting the PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS Lexicon into RDF with lemon

This paper describes the publication and linking of (parts of) PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS (PSC), a large scale Italian lexicon, to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud using the lemon model. The main challenge of the conversion is discussed, namely the reconciliation between the PSC semantic structure which contains richly encoded semantic information, following the qualia structure of the Generative Lexicon theory and the lemon view of lexical sense as a reified pairing of a lexical item and a concept in an ontology. The result is two datasets: one consists of a list of lemon lexical entries with their lexical properties, relations and senses; the other consists of a list of OWL individuals representing the referents for the lexical senses. These OWL individuals are linked to each other by a set of semantic relations and mapped onto the SIMPLE OWL ontology of higher level semantic types.