Towards the Integration of Sign Languages Data in the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud

Abstract

Purpose: In the field of electronic lexicography, there is an increasing interest in offering ways to represent and interlink lexical data originating from different modalities. This topic is particularly discussed within initiatives and projects concerned with the representation of lexical information in a Linked Data (LD) compliant format, so that they can be published within the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud. In this context, we can observe that Sign Language (SL) lexical data are not currently represented in the datasets included in the LLOD cloud. Looking at the “Overview of Data-sets for the Sign Languages of Europe”, published by the “Easier” European project,3 we also do not see any mention of a dataset being available in an LD-compliant format. We therefore investigate ways of representing SL data in the LLOD cloud and linking them to other types of language data already available in an LD-compliant format.