A Case Study on Interoperability for Language Resources and Applications

This paper reports our experience when integrating differ resources and services into a grid environment. The use case we address implies the deployment of several NLP applications as web services. The ultimate objective of this task was to create a scenario where researchers have access to a variety of services they can operate. These services should be easy to invoke and able to interoperate between one another. We essentially describe the interoperability problems we faced, which involve metadata interoperability, data interoperability and service interoperability. We devote special attention to service interoperability and explore the possibility to define common interfaces and semantic description of services. While the web services paradigm suits the integration of different services very well, this requires mutual understanding and the accommodation to common interfaces that not only provide technical solution but also ease the user‟s work. Defining common interfaces benefits interoperability but requires the agreement about operations and the set of inputs/outputs. Semantic annotation allows defining some sort of taxonomy that organizes and collects the set of admissible operations and types input/output parameters