<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W03-0809">
  <Title>Automatic Creation of Interface Specifications from Ontologies</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Interface specifications are an important part of the computational infrastructure in engineering language technology (LT) systems. This is a challenging task, especially for large-scale and multi-domain systems with numerous processing modules. To a great extent, the successful operation of such a system depends on the high-quality domain representations exchanged between individual modules. null Ontologies have traditionally been used to represent domain knowledge and are employed for various linguistic tasks, e. g., semantic interpretation, anaphora, or metonymy resolution. We propose an additional way of employing ontologies, i. e., to use the knowledge modeled therein as the basis for defining the semantics and the content of the information exchanged between the modules of LT systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In language technology systems, modules typically exchange messages, e. g., a parser of a dialogue system might get word lattices as input and produce corresponding semantic representations for later processing modules, such as a discourse manager. The increasing employment of XML-based interfaces for agent-based or other multi-blackboard communication systems sets a de facto standard for syntax and expressive capabilities of the information that is exchanged amongst modules. The content and structure of the information to be 1The resulting software is licensed under the GPL and is a free software project. The package and respective documentation can be obtained from http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/oil2xsd.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> represented is typically defined in corresponding XML schemata (XMLS) or Document Type Definitions (DTD).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Employing the approach introduced below, XMLS and DTDs are created such that they: a6 stay logically consistent, as the logical consistency of ontologies can be checked with the help of available tools, a6 are easy to manage, a6 enable a straight-forward mapping back to the respective knowledge representation for inference, a6 allow the handling of language processing tasks immediately on the basis of XMLS.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we will give an overview of the approaches to knowledge storage as employed in LT systems. Section 3 outlines the task that we address, highlights the problems which arise when mapping knowledge structures from ontologies to XMLS and how these have been solved in our implementation. Section 4 discusses how the approach has been deployed in a real-life dialogue system as well as some of the additional advantages resulting from its application. Related approaches are, then, discussed in Section</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>