Introduction

lemon is a model developed in the Monnet project to be a standard for sharing lexical information on the semantic web. lemon draws heavily from earlier work of the Monnet members, in particular from LexInfo (Cimiano et al., 2011), LIR (Montiel-Ponsoda et al., 2008) and LMF (Francopoulo et al., 2006). lemon in contrast to these systems aims to be

• Concise: As few classes and definitions as needed.
• Descriptive not prescriptive: lemon uses external sources for the majority of its definitions. As such the lemon system can be extended in different ways to handle different purposes, i.e., terminological variation, morpho-syntactic description, translation memory exchange.
• Modular: lemon divides into a number of modules, meaning it is not necessary to implement the entire model to create a functional lexicon.
• RDF-native: In order to enable sharing on the semantic web, and for interface with tools lemon is based on RDF. This also allows for greater representation of linking between different sections of the lexicon.