TELIX: An RDF-Based Model for Linguistic Annotation Emilio Rubiera 1 , Luis Polo 1 , Diego Berrueta 1 , and Adil El Ghali 2 1 Fundación CTIC name.surname@fundacionctic.org 2 IBM CAS France adil.elghali@fr.ibm.com Abstract. This paper proposes the application of the RDF framework to the representation of linguistic annotations. We argue that RDF is a suitable data model to capture multiple annotations on the same text seg- ment, and to integrate multiple layers of annotations. As well as using RDF for this purpose, the main contribution of the paper is an OWL ontol- ogy, called TELIX (Text Encoding and Linguistic Information eXchange), which models annotation content. This ontology builds on the SKOS XL vocabulary, a W3C standard for representation of lexical entities as RDF graphs. We extend SKOS XL in order to capture lexical relations between words (e.g., synonymy), as well as to support word sense disambiguation, morphological features and syntactic analysis, among others. In addition, a formal mapping of feature structures to RDF graphs is defined, enabling complex composition of linguistic entities. Finally, the paper also suggests the use of RDFa as a convenient syntax that combines source texts and linguistic annotations in the same file. 1 Introduction A linguistic annotation is a descriptive or analytic mark dealing with raw lan- guage data extracted from texts or any other kind of recording. A large and heterogeneous number of linguistic features can be involved. Typically linguistic annotations include part-of-speech tagging, syntactic segmentation, morpholog- ical analysis, co-references marks, phonetic segmentation, prosodic phrasing and discourse structures, among others. There is an increasing need for vendors to interchange linguistic informa- tion and annotations, as well as the source documents they refer to, among different software tools. Text analysis and information acquisition often require incremental steps with associated intermediate results. Moreover, tools and or- ganizations make use of shared resources such as thesauri or annotated corpus. Clearly, appropriate standards that support this open information interchange are necessary. These standards must provide the means to model and serialize the information as files. In [16], the following requirements for a linguistic annotation framework are identified: expressive adequacy, media independence, semantic adequacy, unifor- mity, openness, extensibility, human readability, processability and consistency. E. Simperl et al. (Eds.): ESWC 2012, LNCS 7295, pp. 195–209, 2012. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012