The vocabulary is being developed for different purposes:
- Elexifinder “Categories”, complementary to Elexifinder “Concepts” (obtained through automatic wikifikation).
- Content describing indexation of LexBib bibliographical items.
- Concepts in a tree graph with SKOS relations as edges, and “Lexicography” as root node. This concept tree can be seen as ramification of the “Lexicography” subject heading as listed in cross-domain library vocabularies; see e.g. “Lexicography” in LCSH, or “Lexicography” in BLL.
Graph View, complete (narrowers of “Lexicography”)

Click here for the most up-to-date graph representation, including all narrowers of “Lexicography”, i.e. the SKOS vocabulary tree, with concept “Lexicography” as root.
Another version of this graph view includes closeMatch and related concepts, i.e. concepts that are not part of the broader-narrower tree, but linked to some node of it using skos:closeMatch or skos:related relation. closeMatch concepts are also considered for indexation of articles, while concepts linked to the tree using skos:related are not.
Elexifinder Categories

In this graph view, only concepts that serve as Elexifinder categories appear. These belong to the first three levels below the root concept. Concepts deeper in the hierarchy are considered in article indexation, and so are closeMatch concepts without own broader-hierarchy, but the assigned category visible on Elexifinder will be the corresponding broader category of the third level below root.
Top-level concepts (direct narrowers of “Lexicography”)
The following concepts are directly linked to root node “Lexicography” using skos:broader. These are Elexifinder main categories. Two narrower levels below each top-level concept are also considered as (visible) Elexifinder category. Click on the “Graph” links to get a graph representation, with the top-level concept as root node.
- Dictionary Structure (Graph)
- Dictionary Type (Graph)
- Dictionary Making (Graph)
- Dictionary Use (Graph)
- Dictionary Function (Graph)
- Dictionary Distribution Type (Graph)
- Linguistic Property (Graph)
- NLP / Corpus Linguistics (Graph)
Sources
Sources for the controlled vocabulary have been the following:
- An updated and extended version of the index of “Bibliografía Temática de la Lexicografía” (Córdoba Rodríguez 2003), translated to English. The original index served as starting point for manually crafting the main backbone of the SKOS vocabulary. Manually added terms are also part of this collection. [See members here.]
- The Typology of Dictionaries by Engelberg and Storrer (2016: 43). [See members here.]
<TBD: english translations of dictionary type labels.> - The Glossary of Lexicographic Terms by Kipfer (2013). [See members here.]
- The index of the volume “Using Online Dictionaries” (Müller-Spitzer 2014). [See members here.]
- The “Linguistic Property” branch of the GOLD ontology. [See members here.]
- Natural Languages and their multilingual labels (language names), from Wikidata. [See List.]
We have merged all concepts stemming from sources (1) to (5), and set relations between them, so that terms can be represented as nodes in a single graph, with SKOS relations as edges.
In a second step, we have extended the vocabulary with a manually revised subset of salient term candidates, extracted from a corpus compiled using all English full texts present in the collection used for Elexifinder version 2 (Spring 2021).
We have then extended the vocabulary further, using term extraction results from subsets of our English full texts. This has been done for the field of “dictionary digitization” (narrower of “dictionary making”).
Names of natural languages are part of the vocabulary, and LexBib items are indexed with them, according to the language names occurring in their full texts. They are not used as Elexifinder category, since natural languages as search filter are available through wikification (Elexifinder “concepts”, not “categories”.)
Regarding update workflow: As soon as new concepts are linked to the main SKOS graph using skos:broader or skos:closeMatch, they are considered in subsequent updates of the article indexation. Existing relations can and will be updated, according to community feedback, and our own evaluation.