3.2.5. Your First QA Run

The last step should be straightforward: test your QA system with a first question. The QAPlanner encapsulates the whole QA system in one WS, so this component is the one you will use for testing now. Your method of choice is the answerQuestion web method. As you can see from the SOAP request skeleton that soapUI has provided for you, the answerQuestion web method receives a natural language question string and the spatiotemporal context of the question. Provided that you use the German language subsystem and the location specific components for Germany, the following SOAP request body should return your first answer structure:

<soapenv:Body>
	<qap:inquiry>
		<qap:question>Wo kann ich heute in Schmelz den Film Dreamgirls sehen?</qap:question>
		<qal:spatiotemporalContext>
			<qal:location lat="49.256409" lon="7.042437">DE</qal:location>
			<qal:time>2007-03-18T12:58:21</qal:time>
		</qal:spatiotemporalContext>
	</qap:inquiry>
</soapenv:Body>
In English this question would have been “Where can I see the movie Dreamgirls in Schmelz today?”. The answer structure you get as a result is explained in the description of the demo component implementations in section
4.4: “Demo Components Description”.

The demo components contain answer data from the cinema and movies domain. Refer to section 4.4 for a description of the demo components and for more information on the available answer data. Or simply start asking questions to find out which data is available: “Which cinemas are there in Saarbrücken?” should give you first results provided that you are using the English language subsystem and the location specific components for Germany.

Before concluding this section, we should have a closer look at the spatiotemporal context part of the above SOAP request: the spatial part, i.e., the <location> element, has to specify the exact location of the user who has posed the given question. This position is represented as geocoordinates in the form of latitude and longitude values. The location string (“DE” in the example) can actually be anything; however, it is recommended to use the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code of the user’s location here in order to support the location identification if the reverse geocoding on the basis of the given coordinates should not be possible. The temporal part of the question context is a simple time value.