OnLiT: An Ontology for Linguistic Terminology Bettina Klimek 1 , John P. McCrae 2 , Christian Lehmann 3 , Christian Chiarcos 4 , and Sebastian Hellmann 1 1 InfAI, University of Leipzig, klimek,hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de, WWW home page: aksw.org/Groups/KILT 2 Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway, john@mccr.ae, WWW home page: https://www.insight-centre.org 3 christian.lehmann@uni-erfurt.de, WWW home page: http://www.christianlehmann.eu 4 Applied Computational Linguistics, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, chiarcos@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de, WWW home page: http://acoli.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract. Understanding the differences underlying the scope, usage and content of language data requires the provision of a clarifying termi- nological basis which is integrated in the metadata describing a partic- ular language resource. While terminological resources such as the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, ISOcat or the GOLD ontology provide a considerable amount of linguistic terms, their practical usage is limited to a look up of a defined term whose relation to other terms is unspecified or insufficient. Therefore, in this paper we propose an ontology for linguistic terminology, called OnLiT. It is a data model which can be used to rep- resent linguistic terms and concepts in a semantically interrelated data structure and, thus, overcomes prevalent isolating definition-based term descriptions. OnLiT is based on the LiDo Glossary of Linguistic Terms and enables the creation of RDF datasets, that represent linguistic terms and their meanings within the whole or a subdomain of linguistics. Keywords: linguistic terminology, linguistic linked data, LiDo database 1 Introduction The research field of language data has evolved to encompass a multitude of inter- disciplinary scientific areas that are all more or less closely bound to the central studies of linguistics. Understanding the differences underlying the scope, usage and content of language data provided by diciplines such as linguistics, computa- tional linguistics, digital humanities or content analytics, requires the provision of a clarifying terminological basis which is integrated in the metadata describ- ing a particular language resource. Moreover, the comparative use of resources of different languages presupposes that they use the same conceptual frame- work and terminology. This demand for specifying linguistic terminology has