Ontology-driven Natural Language Access to Legacy and Web Services in the Insurance Domain

Ontologies can play an important role in industrial systems by enabling access to Legacy resources in a transparent and distributed way. Ontologies are developed in order to provide machine-processable semantics of information that is exchanged between different agents, either humans or software. The same mechanism can be used for Legacy service discovery, as well as for automated reasoning about the content of answers obtained from that service. We have created an information system offering a natural language, webbased access to distributed Legacy systems in the insurance domain. The application offers a communication channel that actualizes a new model of business interaction between an end user and a service provider, an insurance company in our case. Our system leverages on the knowledge management framework developed within the Eureka funded research project IKF, which has been adapted to the Insurance Domain by building a dedicated Domain Ontology named IES. The core component, named MetaDiscoverer, implements an ontology-based filtering of user queries in order to discover the intended Legacy service. Our application is able to perform information retrieval, knowledge extraction, automated reasoning, service location and dynamic invocation. The solution is RDF and XML-compliant, according to the recommendations given by the W3C Consortium.