Concept Coding Framework (CCF)

Welcome to ConceptCoding.Org, the nonprofit organisation formed to manage and maintain the Concept Coding Framework (CCF), lexical ontologt resources, developed to link graphical symbolic libraries (currently Blissymbolics and ARASAAC symbols, and eventually other alternative representations) to mainstream lexical and other Language Technology (LT) resources.

The CCF will be maintained as a free and open source project, possibly combined with other parallel licensing alternatives, as we want to collaborate with experts and stakeholders in the AAC field as well as in the mainstream desktop, internet and mobile technologies and accessibility areas based on open standards. Thus we have established an cc-ig interest group for the concept coding approach. If you are interested in getting involved at whatever level then please contact us.

Around the world, people with impaired communication, including difficulties to read or write, may use symbols as an alternative or complement to character based texts. Referencing to, and exchanging these alternatively coded messages over the Internet is difficult due to the lack of standardised encoding schemes and common practises. This site is intended to motivate, describe and promote the introduction and adoption of a common, open and vendor neutral Concept Coding Framework (CCF) to overcome some of these difficulties. In particular will act as a base for all contribution to this work - be it formal documentation or informal discussions.

The suggested CCF has been carefully designed to be conformant to the standard language technologies that are rapidly developing and penetrating the Internet communities. In this way we believe that the proposed CCF can contribute to a major leap in bridging between different technologies and products developed for AAC users and, more importantly, between these Assistive Technologies (AT) and the main-stream technologies of today's and tomorrow's networked information society.

The bridging approach also implies that the CCF is not intended to replace and exclude the use and development of current and future proprietary assistive technologies in the AAC field. Instead the CCF and its bridging technology and tools are designed to provide added value for all stake-holders; AAC users, special product developers and service providers, as well as general service and information providers who want to support improved accessibility to their products.

Designed to be used over the Internet for email, web-based activities, chat and/or other emerging Internet based services, the CCF technology can, however, be used by software manufacturers also to provide additional functionality, enhanced support for, and integration of, software and systems with multi-modal language features mainly intended for local use.

The CCF work started as part of the EU funded WWAAC project. It has since then been applied and developed in connection to the Nordic SYMBERED project, and most recently in relation to a task within the still ongoing European and international AEGIS-project. Concept coding has been used in building open source components for graphic symbol support in LibreOffice and OpenOffice Writer (CCF-SymbolWriter), as well as in prototype Java based cross-platform mobile AAC applications for Android devices (CCF-SymbolDroid).

The services used has been combined into a locally deployable server (CCF-SymbolServer), and is also available from ccf.conceptcoding.org. A special version of SAW 6 (Special Access to Windows) has been made to directly use the CCF-SymbolServer.