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A Taxonomy of Lexical Metadata Categories

Metadata registries comprising sets of categories to be used in data collections exist in many fields. The purpose of a metadata registry is to facilitate data exchange and interoperability within a domain, and registries often contain definitions and examples. In this paper we will argue that in order to ensure completeness, consistency, user-friendliness and extensibility, metadata registries should be structured as taxonomies. Furthermore we will illustrate the usefulness of using terminological ontologies as the basis for developing metadata taxonomies. In this connection we will discuss the principles of developing ontologies and the differences between taxonomies and ontologies. The paper includes examples of initiatives for developing metadata standards within the field of language resources, more specifically lexical data categories, elaborated at international and national level. However, the principles that we introduce for the development of data category registries are relevant not only for metadata registries for lexical resources, but for all kinds of metadata registries.