KaBAL (Knowledge Base Access Language): a language for querying and editing XML documents, applied to linguistic knowledge base

In this paper, we describe KaBAL (Knowledge Base Access Language), a language for querying and editing XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents and apply it to our linguistic Knowledge Base. We exploit the inherently application-independent nature of XML to represent our data. Because of this representation, we are able to quickly develop CGI-driven Web interfaces to the database tailored to specific groups of users, such as linguistically-savvy knowledge base developers or linguistically-naive customers. This query language can also be used to change the database. The query language can be used interactively, by the Web interface, or can be used as part of a script for batch processing