Converting the Liddell Scott Greek-English Lexicon into Linked Open Data using lemon

The emergence and growing popularity of Linked Open Data (LOD) offers researchers a new range of possibilities when it comes to publishing datasets online (Hyvönen 2012, Oomen et al 2012); indeed not only does the success of LOD greatly facilitate the process of making scholarly data accessible and to a wider community but it also permits the enrichment of individual datasets by linking them to the other datasets available on the so called Linked Open Data Cloud. The advantages of Linked Open Data for teachers, academics and students in the humanities are obvious and are indeed manifold. However there is currently a paucity of linked open datasets in fields such as philology and literary studies, and in particular of datasets that deal with classical languages such as ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin. This seems strange given the rich abundance of surviving works, of both a religious and secular character, that exist in those languages. A salient consideration here relates to the fact that even when such works have been digitised and made available in a format such as TEI-XML, a format which renders the structure and content of such texts more amenable to computer processing, the conversion of these resources into the Resource Data Framework (RDF), the standardised data model that underpins the Semantic Web, is not always straightforward. In this article we describe ongoing work in the conversion of an important 19th century Ancient Greek resource the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon, into RDF, part of a wider program of work that has been recently initiated at CNR-ILC in converting historical lexicons in languages such as Greek, Latin and Arabic into Linked Open Data.