The present article features the Ontology of German Grammar, one of six information modules in the Web Information System on German Grammar known as GRAMMIS. The ontology module was developed to enhance information retrieval and to inform the user about terminological issues in German grammar. It consists of a knowledge base and an interface with special functions that facilitate both information search and retrieval. The knowledge base itself consolidates - as much as possible - the heterogeneous, non-standardized grammatical terminologies used in texts on German grammar and gives general information about grammatical concepts. The interface provides means (1) to navigate the ontology and learn more about the categories and vocabulary of grammar; (2) to retrieve texts from all GRAMMIS modules at once; and (3) either to expand or narrow the query according to user needs and the amount of information found in GRAMMIS. The ontology is implemented in an object-relational database management system, thus ensuring its optimal interaction with other GRAMMIS resources mostly encoded in XML. On the other hand, its current structure allows transformation to conventional ontology as well as thesaurus formats if needed.
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