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<Paper uid="C90-2055">
  <Title>(*) Many people are taking part in the development of SESAME. For the Linguistic aspects: Blandine Gelain, St~phane Guez, Jean-Michel Liaunet, Fariba Ommani, and Zhengce Peng, and for the Information System and User Interface aspects: Pascal Fischer, Eli,: Kerbaje, Laurent Lacote, and Amaud Villemin.</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The purpose of the SESAME project is to provide users with the possibility of extracting data from an information system in a language as close as possible to natural language. Users will be allowed to express queries with concepts closer to the external model of an application than to the logical schemas of data bases. It is thus necessary to use a model of the content of the information system at the conceptual level. The semantics of the application will be represented by a conceptual model. Mapping modules will be used to translate conceptual representations into relational schemas.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The natural language query expressed by the user is translated into a logical form by a parser. This parser uses a grammar and a lexicon specific to a particular application. It has access to the conceptual schema to validate the semantics of queries. The logical form is then translated into a SQL query, using the information provided by the mapping between the conceptual schema and the relational schema.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> SESAME is an industrial product. It only uses fairly standard techniques. It is an interface generator, portable, intended for a large diffusion. Its most important feature is that it allows people who are not computational linguistics specialists to develop an application fairly easily. The whole design of SESAME is intended to respect this very strong constraint, even when it meant to use less sophisticated techniques than what is available.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Great care has been also put in the design of the user environment for the querying steps as well as for the manipulation of the results provided by the 1 3'Yl data base SESAME is interfaced with (Bates &amp; Weischedel 1987).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The SESAME system is made of four environments: The information system environment used to build the conceptual schema of a given application and to generate mapping rules between the conceptual level and the relational level.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The linguistic environment to generate the linguistic knowledge bases from the conceptual schema of the application and a corpus of the domain.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The query environment provides the user with the tools to query the data base.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> The results management environment provides the user with the tools to manipulate the results of the query provided by the D.B.M.S. and to exploit them through standard office systems or specialized applications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> The first two environments are used by the designers of a particular application to generate the knowledge bases necessary for this application. The two other environments are intended for the regular use of SESAME, once a particular application has been implemented.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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