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Glossary
The Power project

Declarative language: a general term for a relational language or a functional language, as opposed to an imperative language. Declarative languages describe relationships between variables in terms of functions and the language executor applies some of these relations to produce a result. Prolog is a declarative language.

Dynamic document delivery (DDD): is a system for generating World Wide Web pages directly from a database to suit an individual's interests, level of knowledge, and language they speak using dynamic hypertext architecture.

Dynamic hypertext architecture: is an interactive loop that constantly generates documents in response to the user's use of the system.

Functional language: a language that supports and encourages functional programming. Functional languages are one type of declarative language. Haskell is an example of a functional language.

ILEX: system developed for the Scottish Museum in Edinburgh to write labels for objects.

Imperative language: a procedural language in contrast to a declarative language. It describes a language where the programmer specifies an explicit sequence of steps to follow to produce a result. Pascal , C and Basic are examples of imperative language.

Knowledge base: a collection of knowledge expressed using some formal knowledge representation language. A knowledge base forms part of a knowledge-based system (KBS).

Language technology: allows computers to use the same kind of language that people use and to make it easier for people to interact with them directly .

Lexicon: the list of words belonging to a particular subject.

LISP: programming language based on functional paradigm.

Natural language architecture: is a one-way system that allows the user to select information from a database. The system then structures the information into a text plan and generates a document in natural language.

Object oriented programming (OOP): a class of programming languages and techniques based on the concept of an "object" which is a data structure encapsulated with a set of routines which operate on the data. C++ and Java are object oriented programs.

PEBA-II: a system that describes animals in an encyclopedic context developed by Maria Milosavljevic.

Prolog: programming language based on logic paradigm. It is an example of a declarative language.

Prototype: a model.

System architecture: the structure of the system and the components within it.

XML: is a markup language much like html. It was designed to describe data and to focus on what data is. XML stands for Extensible markup language.

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