In this paper we will discuss our preliminary work towards the construction of a WordNet for Old English, taking our inspiration from other similar WN construction projects for ancient languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. The Old English WordNet (OldEWN) will build upon this innovative work in a number of different ways which we articulate in the article, most importantly by treateating figurative meaning as a ‘first-class citizen’ in the structuring of the semantic system. From a more practical perspective we will describe our plan to utilize a pre-existing lexicographic resource and the naisc system to automatically compile a provisional version of the WordNet which will then be checked and enriched by Old English experts.

The OntoLex vocabulary enjoys increasing popularity as a means of publishing lexical resources with RDF and as Linked Data. The recent publication of a new OntoLex module for lexicography, lexicog, reflects its increasing importance for digital lexicography. However, not all aspects of digital lexicography have been covered to the same extent. In particular, supplementary information drawn from corpora such as frequency information, links to attestations, and collocation data were considered to be beyond the scope of lexicog. Therefore, the OntoLex community has put forward the proposal for a novel module for frequency, attestation and corpus information (FrAC), that not only covers the requirements of digital lexicography, but also accommodates essential data structures for lexical information in natural language processing. This paper introduces the current state of the OntoLex-FrAC vocabulary, describes its structure, some selected use cases, elementary concepts and fundamental definitions, with a focus on frequency and attestations.