1. Semantics-based Interoperability Gopal Gupta The University of Texas at Dallas

2. Interoperability The IEEE defines interoperability as:IEEE The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged Challenge: The 2 systems may speak “different language” Solution: Translate between the various languages Requirement: Translator rapidly developable for this approach to be practical

3. The Translation Problem Given a sentence S (a program, a file, etc.), written in a notation Ls, obtain an semantically equivalent sentence T in another notation Lt. Of course, It should be possible to map the semantics of the source notation Ls to (a subset of) the target notation Lt. Structure of the notation to be translated has to be inferred via parsing and semantically processed to obtain the encoding in target notation. Common approach: Build a compiler that compiles programs/documents in notation Ls to those in Lt. Use the compiler to translate S.

4. Semantics-based Approach Translators can be rapidly built by writing semantics of Ls in terms of Lt using logic programming (Prolog) Prolog is a declarative, high level language which allows rapid construction of software Parsers for even context sensitive languages can be built rapidly (e.g., Nexus) translate(S, T) :- Ps(S, Rs), Mst(Rs, Rt), Pt(T, Rt).

5. CIF based Approach Find a common intermediate format (e.g., NEXUS) Build back-and-forth translators between all other notations and NEXUS Past & Current Work Translator between Nemeth Math and Latex; subsequently CIF approach used with Latex as the CIF (spun into a company) Translators between Architectural Description Languages Translators between OO DB and Relational DB Translators between various XMLs (HTML -> VoiceXML) Translators between GUI test scripting languages

6. Other Work & References Work also done on service discovery & composition as well as semantically describing web-services References: G. Gupta Horn Logic Denotations and Their Applications," The Logic Prog. Paradigm: A 25 year perspective Springer Verlag. pp. 127-160. G. Gupta, E. Pontelli, et al. Semantic-Based Filtering: LP's Killer Approach? 4th PADL LNCS 2257, Springer Verlag, pp. 82-100. S. Kona, A. Bansal, G. Gupta. Semantics-based Efficient Service Discovery and Composition. In Proc.International Conference on Web Services. 2007. E. Pontelli, D. Ranjan, G. Gupta, B. Milligan. Design & Implementation of a Domain Specific Language for Phylogenetic Inference. Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, 1(2):2003. pp. 201-230. + Others

7. Questions…