[1] The scope is standardization of principles and methods relating to language resources in the contexts of multilingual communication.
Types of individual instantiations of LMF can include monolingual, bilingual or multilingual lexical resources.
In the past, lexicon standardization has been studied and developed by a series of projects like GENELEX, EDR, EAGLES, MULTEXT, PAROLE, SIMPLE and ISLE.
In Fall 2003, the French delegation issued a technical proposition for a data model dedicated to NLP lexicons.
In early 2004, the ISO/TC 37 committee decided to form a common ISO project with Nicoletta Calzolari (CNR-ILC Italy) as convenor and Gil Francopoulo (Tagmatica France) and Monte George (ANSI, United States) as editors.
A large panel of 60 experts contributed a wide range of requirements for LMF that covered many types of NLP lexicons.
13 versions have been written, dispatched (to the National nominated experts), commented and discussed during various ISO technical meetings.
After five years of work, including numerous face-to-face meetings and e-mail exchanges, the editors arrived at a coherent UML model.
The two level organization forms a coherent family of standards with the following common and simple rules: The linguistics constants like /feminine/ or /transitive/ are not defined within LMF but are recorded in the Data Category Registry (DCR) that is maintained as a global resource by ISO/TC 37 in compliance with ISO/IEC 11179-3:2003.
The other 14 chapters deal with a lexicon or a system, either in the civil or military domain, either within scientific research labs or for industrial applications.