Toward a Standard Lexical Resource in the Bio Domain

The present paper describes a large-scale lexical resource for the biology domain designed both for human and for machine use. This lexicon aims at semantic interoperability and extendability, through the adoption of ISO-LMF standard for lexical representation and through a granular and distributed encoding of relevant information. The first part of this contribution focuses on three aspects of the model that are of particular interest to the biology community: the treatment of term variants, the representation on bio events and the alignment with a domain ontology. The second part of the paper describes the physical implementation of the model: a relational database equipped with a set of automatic uploading procedures. Peculiarity of the BioLexicon is that it combines features of both terminologies and lexicons. A set verbs relevant for the domain is also represented with full details on their syntactic and semantic argument structure.