Lemon is a proposed model for modeling lexicon and machine-readable dictionaries and linked to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud. It was designed to meet the following challenges

• RDF-native form to enable leverage of existing Semantic Web technologies (SPARQL, OWL, RIF etc.).
• Linguistically sound structure based on LMF to enable conversion to existing offline formats.
• Separation of the lexicon and ontology layers, to ensure compatability with existing OWL models.
• Linking to data categories, in order to allow for arbitrarily complex linguistic description. In particular the LexInfo vocabulary is aligned to lemon and ISOcat.
• A small model using the principle of least power - the less expressive the language, the more reusable the data.

Lemon was developed by the Monnet project as a collaboration between: CITEC at Bielefeld University, DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz

• Dbnary
• DBpedia Wiktionary
• Parole/Simple
• ubyLemon

To see how to get started with the model see our guide

For full documentation you may consult the Lemon Cookbook

Lemon API is a Java-based interface for using lemon that is compatible with all major platforms. In addition, there is a Wiki-like site for manipulating and publishing lemon data, called Lemon Source. This includes a service for generating lexica from ontologies.

Lemon is still under development and we welcome contributions. If you wish to get involved please join the W3C OntoLex Community Group