Resource Sharing by Multilingual Expression Services

Multilingual expression services (MESs) are available in many multicultural fields, such as education, medical care, and disaster prevention. In Japan, for example, local governments and NPOs create parallel-texts and provide expression services in such fields. However, these services present a common difficulty: the lack of parallel-texts. Service-computing technology has the potential to allow them to collaborate. In this paper, we show how Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be applied to multicultural activities. As a first step, we propose an architecture, in which language resources are available as Web services, and MESs can obtain parallel-texts from the language web services. To achieve this, RDF metadata are attached to parallel-texts and stored in a separate RDF repository, with which users can describe what they need in detail. This arrangement allows MESs to select only the contents they need from the shared resources and show them to users. Our implementation confirms that the proposed architecture works well with two real services in use.