Knowledge-based methodology for supporting multilingual and user-tailored interfaces

The need for multilingual and user-tailored interfaces imposes new requirements upon the software industry: software applications must `speak' the language of users. Language engineering and knowledge engineering can assist the development of such interfaces. This paper presents a methodology for the creation of a language-independent knowledge base (KB), which can be used for the development of multilingual and user-tailored interfaces. This KB contains knowledge about the user interface components and functions and its creation is part of a software internationalization process. The methodology aims at reducing the cost of setting up and managing this KB, by exploiting the benefits of controlled language use in technical writing. A case study for the dynamic generation of multilingual and user-tailored diagnostic messages is presented. Finally, the paper discusses related approaches in the area of multilinguality as well as in the area of software internationalization and localization, summarizes the main results, and presents our plans for further exploitation of the methodology.