Initiatives, Tendencies and Driving Forces for a 'Lexical Web' as Part of a 'Language Infrastructure'

While highlighting the infrastructural role of Language Resources (LR) I sketch my perception of the current situation in the LR field. I underline some of the priority areas of concern today with respect to implementing an open Language Infrastructure, and specifically what we could call a "Lexical Web". My objective is to show that it is imperative that there is an underlying global strategy behind the set of initiatives which are/can be launched in Europe and world-wide, and that a global vision and cooperation among different communities is necessary to achieve more coherent and useful results. I end up mentioning two new European initiatives that go on this direction and promise to be influential in shaping the future of the LR area.