Concept coding projects at AAATE 2003 session

The 7th European Conference for the Advancement of Assistive Technology
(AAATE 2003) was Aug 31 - Sep 3 this year in Dublin.  There was one session
on AAC which had interesting links to the semantic web and also to Lisa's
whitepaper on natural language usage, so i thought it's worth sharing some
of the content with you.  Sorry it took me so long to get back with this to
you.

Particularly there were two interesting presentations:

(1) Improving Access to the Internet Within the AAC Community 
David Poulson, Colette Nicolle 
Loughborough University
UK

The EU WWAAC (World Wide Augmentative and Alternative Communication) project
(www.wwaac.org) is contributing to the development of WCAG 2.0.  They have
an adapted Web browser that supports symbol and verbal language
representations.  They are also working on "concept coding", a mechanism to
transfer semantic codes that can be represented in symbol alphabets.  An
abstract of the paper is available at
http://www.atireland.ie/aaate/php/article.php?article=141&event=48.

(2) People using Graphic Symbol based Augmentative and Alternative
Communication and the Internet: Guidelines and Tools for Supporting Symbol
Conversation in Web Browsing and Email 
Lundalv, M. Lysley, A. Clarke,M.
DART, Sweden

Concept coding tools are existing that facilitate email exchange between an
English PCS user and a Swedish Bliss user, for example.  Works with verbal
languages too, if using a constraint vocabulary that is analogous to the
symbol sets.  The Concept Coding Framework (CCF) aims to link existing
concept coding tools to Web based semantic approaches.  It will start with
linking AAC vocabularies, and the "Voice of America" (VOA) Special English
Word Book (1500 words), to Kaon WordNet using RDF.  XPointer technology will
be used to tag any word of a given document.  Information on the VOA Special
English and its Word Book can be found at
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/.  An abstract of the AAATE 2003 paper
is available at
http://www.atireland.ie/aaate/php/article.php?article=62&event=48.

Gottfried
___________________________________________________

 Dr. Gottfried Zimmermann
 ICT Accessibility Architect
 Access Technologies Group, Germany
 http://www.accesstechnologiesgroup.com
 Phone +49 7121 790806
___________________________________________________

Received on Wednesday, 29 October 2003 13:46:56 UTC