A research presentation, delivered at the workshop “Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics: Bridging the Red Sea Rift – Somali Workshop IV”, held at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” on 13 June 2024. The presentation illustrates ongoing work on the creation of a bilingual Somali–Italian computational lexicon based on the notebooks of the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi (1852–1928), focusing on terminological extraction, linguistic analysis, and onto-terminological modelling using Semantic Web standards (e.g. OntoLex-Lemon, SIMPLE). The research is carried out by the Institute of Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli” (CNR) in collaboration with international partners and is funded by the Rut ETS Foundation.