Lexical Semantics in the Age of the Semantic Web

Paul Buitelaar
DFKI GmbH, Language Technology Department
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
paulb@dfki.de

1. Introduction
Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning. The semantic web is a vision of what the web
could be if it would foremost consist of knowledge (structured data) rather than text or other
unstructured data as it is today. This talk is about the future of word meaning if the semantic
web becomes a reality. First, I will therefore briefly clarify what the semantic web vision
consists of, followed by a sketch of lexical semantics. Finally, I will speculate on how the
inherent semantic standardization process of the semantic web could have a dramatic
influence on the study and use of word meaning.


References
[1] Tim BernersLee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila  The Semantic Web: A new form of
Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new
possibilities. Scientific American. May, 2001.
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0004814410D21C7084A9809EC588EF21
[2] http://dublincore.org/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfschema/
[4] http://www.daml.org/2001/03/daml+oilindex
[5] http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema
[6] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/
[7] Gil Y., Ratnaker V. -- A Comparison of (Semantic) Markup Languages. In:
Proceedings of AAAI 2001. http://trellis.semanticweb.org/expect/web/semanticweb/comparison.html
[8] http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/about.html

