Introduction and Overview

The explosion of information technology in the last two decades has led to a substantial growth in quantity, diversity and complexity of web-accessible linguistic data. These resources become even more useful when linked with each other, and the last few years have seen the emergence of numerous approaches in various disciplines concerned with linguistic resources. It is the challenge of our time to store, interlink and exploit this wealth of data accumulated in more than half a century of computational linguistics (Dostert, 1955), of empirical, corpus-based study of language (Francis and Kucera, 1964), and of computational lexicography (Morris, 1969) in all its heterogeneity. A crucial question involved here is the interoperability of the language resources, actively addressed by the community since the late 1980s (Text Encoding Initiative, 1990), but still a problem that is partially solved at best (Ide and Pustejovsky, 2010). A closely related challenge is information integration, i.e., how heterogeneous information from different sources can be retrieved and combined in an efficient way. With the rise of the Semantic Web, new representation formalisms and novel technologies have become available, and, independently from each other, researchers in different communities have recognized the potential of these devel-