An open knowledge base for Italian in a collaborative perspective

In this paper, we describe the architecture and collaborative approach adopted for the development of Senso Comune (SC), an open knowledge base for the Italian language that combines lexicographic, linguistic, ontological and textual data in a web- based collaborative platform. Senso Comune aims at integrating lexicographic data from users and legacy resources with a formally characterized ontology grounded on lexical semantic structures. Senso Comune was conceived as a linguistic knowledge base rather than a dictionary. It is actually based on a conceptual apparatus that is unusual in typical linguistic resources:, each sense is mapped to ontological categories, and is associated with semantic frames. A wiki provides a collaborative platform for editing a basic lexicon of Italian with different access and annotation privileges that dynamically enables crowd-sourced annotations. Senso Comune proposes different levels of interrelated representation layers that differently exploit collaborative annotation.