Linguist List - Projects

Welcome to The LEGO Project Area

The LEGO project (Lexicon Enhancement via the GOLD Ontology) is taking a number of lexicons (provided by their creators) and digitizing them. After these lexicons are made available online, they will be tagged with terms from GOLD, the General Ontology for Linguistic Description. As this data will be linked to GOLD, the lexicons will be interoperable. This means that users will be able to construct linguistically interesting queries using the lexicons drawn from 16 different projects which cover more than 300 languages. This will be a significant resource for typologists, semanticists, lexicographers, translators and other researchers.


Currently, work is being done to evaluate the different types and formats of lexicons to select an XML framework which will, beyond simply accommodating all of this data, make the most of the wealth of information which the lexicons contain. The LEGO team will then design a search interface, working with data collaborators to digitize their lexicons. In the future, the process that has been established for digitizing these lexicons will be available to be applied to other lexicons as well, so that the network of information can continue to grow.