A graphical language addresses the need to communicate medical information in
a synthetic way. Medical concepts are expressed by icons conveying fast visual
information about patients' current state or about the known effects of drugs.
In order to increase the visual language's acceptance and usability, a natural
language generation interface is currently developed. In this context, this
paper describes the use of an informatics method ---graph transformation--- to
prepare data consisting of concepts in an OWL-DL ontology for use in a natural
language generation component. The OWL concept may be considered as a
star-shaped graph with a central node. The method transforms it into a graph
representing the deep semantic structure of a natural language phrase. This
work may be of future use in other contexts where ontology concepts have to be
mapped to half-formalized natural language expressions.Comment: Presented at the TSD 2014 conference: Text, Speech and Dialogue, 17th
international conference. Brno, Czech Republic, September 8-12, 2014. 10
pages, 7 figure