General Ontology for Linguistic Description, shortly GOLD, was developed within the E-Meld Project whose goals are to develop recommendations of best practices in building metadata, markup, language identification and linguistic ontology.

GOLD is an ontology designed specifically for descriptive linguistics. It defines linguistic domain-specific terms using OWL and provides a formalized list of the most basic and general linguistic categories and their relations, thus is applicable for all (human) languages.

GOLD provides not only definitions to formalize reference categories, but also a semantic framework for the representation of all kinds of linguistic knowledge. Moreover, it defines how the knowledge can be linked to the reference categories.