Towards a gateway between language resources and knowledge resources

Many activities at the European level and world-wide, have contributed to substantially advance knowledge and capability of how to represent, create, maintain, acquire, access, tune, etc. large lexical repositories. These repositories are rich in linguistic knowledge. Many core - or even large -lexical repositories came into existence in European projects, and continued in national projects thus creating the necessary platform for a future European lexical infrastructure. Looking at the future a radical change of perspective is now needed in order to facilitate the integration of the linguistic information resulting from all these initiatives, to bridge the differences between various perspectives on language structure and linguistic content, to put an infrastructure into place for content description and content interoperability at European level and beyond, and to make lexical resources usable within the emerging semantic Web scenario. This objective can only be achieved when working in the direction of an integrated open and distributed lexical infrastructure, based on open content interoperability standards, where not only the linguistic experts can participate, but which includes designers, developers and users of content encoding practices, and also many members of the society.