A Declarative Framework for Transformation and Translation

摘要

Knowledge engineering systems or system components require their inputs to be in certain formats, but the content used for the inputs is often from sources that produce different formats, and thus transformations, also called translations, of the content formats are needed. In addition, often only parts of the source content are of interest, and the transformed content must be put into internal representations of the systems. Such transformations of content are an essential part of virtually all information processing and knowledge engineering systems. This paper describes a declarative framework for such transformations that is powerful, easy to use, and supports efficient implementations. The framework allows the source and target formats to be specified using grammar rules, and allows the relationships between the source and target formats to be specified using mapping rules. For the mapping rules, we describe new and more powerful methods for querying the source content and constructing the target content and the internal representations used by applications. We are implementing the framework and applying it to transformation problems of particular interest to Web applications.