In this paper LexikoNet, a large lexical ontology of German nouns is presented. Unlike GermaNet and the Princeton WordNet, LexikoNet has distinguished type and role hypernyms right from the outset and organizes those lexemes in a parallel, independent hierarchy. In addition to roles and types, LexikoNet uses meronymic and holonymic relations as well as the instance relation. LexikoNet is based on a conceptual hierarchy of currently 1,470 classes to which approximately 90,000 word senses taken from a large German monolingual dictionary, the W\"orterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (WDG), are attached. The conceptual classes provide a useful degree of abstraction for the lexicographic description of selectional restrictions, thus making LexikoNet a useful filtering tool for corpus based lexicographic analysis. LexikoNet is currently used in-house as a filter for lexicographic extraction tasks in the DWDS project. Furthermore, it is used as a classification tool of the “words of the week” provided for the newspaper Die ZEIT on www.zeit.de