Deriving Ontologies from XML Schema

Electronic Trans. on …, 2001

Support in the exchange of data, information, and knowledge is becoming a key issue in current computer technology. Ontologies may play a major role in supporting the information exchange processes, as they provide a shared and common understanding of a domain. However, it is still an important question how ontologies can be applied fruitfully to online resources. Therefore, we will investigate the relation between ontology representation languages and document structure techniques (schemas) on the web. We will do this by giving a detailed comparison of OIL, a proposal for expressing ontologies in the Web, with XML Schema, a proposed standard for describing the structure and semantics of XML based documents. We will argue that these two refer to different levels of abstraction, but that, in several cases, it can be advantageous to base a document schema on an ontology. Lastly, we will show how this can be done by providing an translation procedure from an OIL ontology to a specific XML Schema. This will result in a schema that can be used to capture instances of the ontology. 123

2014

The intense use of the web has made it a very changing environment, its content is in permanent evolution to adapt to the demands. The standards have accompanied this evolution by passing from standards that regroup data with their presentations without any structuring such as HTML, to standards that separate both and give more importance to the structural aspect of the content such as XML standard and its derivatives. Currently, with the appearance of the Semantic Web, ontologies become increasingly present on the web and standards that allow their representations as OWL and RDF/RDFS begin to gain momentum. This paper provided an automatic method that converts XML schema document to ontologies represented in OWL.

Support in the exchange of data, information, and knowledge is becoming a key issue in current computer technology. Ontologies may play a major role in supporting the information exchange processes, as they provide a shared and common understanding of a domain. However, it is still an important question how ontologies can be applied fruitfully to online resources. Therefore, we will investigate the relation between ontology representation languages and document structure techniques (schemas) on the web. We will do this by giving a detailed comparison of OIL, a proposal for expressing ontologies in the Web, with XML Schema, a proposed standard for describing the structure and semantics of XML based documents. We will argue that these two refer to different levels of abstraction, but that, in several cases, it can be advantageous to base a document schema on an ontology. Lastly, we will show how this can be done by providing an translation procedure from an OIL ontology to a specific XML Schema. This will result in a schema that can be used to capture instances of the ontology. 123

2014

In the last decade, the field of Big Data Analytics has become increasingly important in both the academic and the business communities. Typically, data are mostly structured, collected by different actors through various heterogeneous and distributed information sources, and stored and managed often directly in XML. In order to enable large volume of data to be described in such a way that their meaning can be exploited by machines and, thus, semantic queries and automatic inferential procedures can be enabled, this paper presents an automatic method to derive OWL ontologies from XML schemas. The main contribution of this method relies on the possibility of producing a target ontology starting from multiple XML schemas, by discriminating between domain and cross-domain entities and, contextually, simplifying the overall structure of the final ontology generated, i.e. by eliminating not-used cross-domain entities. This method has been applied to a concrete application case in the healthcare domain, with the goal of generating an ontological model from the XML schemas implementing the HL7 Version 3 Clinical Document Architecture Release 2.

Proceedings. 13th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 2002

In the paper we present a methodology for the semiautomated extraction of ontological knowledge from XML data sources in a given domain. We consider an interconnection scenario over the Web, where various independent organizations use XML as a data interchange language for conducting business activities. The resulting ontology is organized into concepts and concept relationships at different levels of detail. Semantic links within and between the different levels are studied in order to capture and formalize semantic relationships between concepts to support multiple views on the ontological knowledge.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) can be used as data exchange format in different domains. It allows different parties to exchange data by providing common understanding of the basic concepts in the domain. XML covers the syntactic level, but lacks support for reasoning. Ontology can provide a semantic representation of domain knowledge which supports efficient reasoning and expressive power. One of the most popular ontology languages is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It can represent domain knowledge using classes, properties, axioms and instances for the use in a distributed environment such as the World Wide Web. This paper presents a new method for automatic generation of OWL ontology from XML data sources.

2017

Nowadays, the great amount of information is stored in many data resources such as relational databases, XML documents and so on. Semantic Web is aimed to make current Web information semantic. The information of data resources should be accessed semantically, to reach this goal, it should be organized and stored under the ontology. Ontology is a key and important concept in Semantic Web. Generally, ontology is a common understanding of a domain. On the other hand, completely manually ontology construction is a time­-consuming, labor intensive and prone to errors process. Therefore, an approach is required to at least semi-automatically extract ontology from data resources. Transformation approach is a convenient one to extract ontologies from various data resources. Hence, Interoperability among extracted ontologies resulted from transformation approach via mediation ontology approaches is possible and false interpretations of information with regard to different conceptualizations...

Proceedings of iiWAS, 2007, 2007

This paper addresses the problem that exists in the context of XML to ontology translation. We firstly discuss the problem regarding the loss of information during roundtrip transformation between XML and ontology followed by the proposal of a mapping representation ontology for modeling concept mappings defined between XML schema and ontology. Our goal is to enable bidirectional data conversion between XML and ontology as well as achieving seamless XML data translation through ontology mediation.

Processes and Resources

One of the promises of the Semantic Web is to support applications that easily and seamlessly deal with heterogeneous data. Most data in the Web, however, is in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, but using XML requires applications to understand the format of each data source that they access. Achieving the benefits of the Semantic Web involves transforming XML into the Semantic Web languages, OWL (the Web Ontology Language) and RDF (the Resource Description Framework), a process that generally has manual or only semi-automatic components. In this chapter, the authors present a set of patterns that enable the automatic transformation from XML Schema into RDF and OWL, enabling the direct use of much XML data in the Semantic Web. They focus on a possible logical representation of the first language and present an implementation, including a comparison with related works.

The construction of a reference ontology still remains an hard human task that is sometimes assisted by software tools that facilitate the information extraction from a textual corpus. Despite of the great use of XML Schema files on the internet and especially in the B2B domain, tools that offer a complete semantic analysis of XML schemas are really rare. Such an analysis could be used to produce automatically a first level conceptual model that can be further enriched manually or automatically using annotations. In this paper we show some results of our experience of building a reference ontology starting from a consistent collection of XML Schema files defined by 23 B2B standard bodies. We show that several problems need to be resolved before developing a complete and automatic tool, but nevertheless we have interesting feedback from users that should encourage research works in this direction. Our contributions are mainly the presentation of a new methodology, the introduction of an OWL compatible concept model, and the exploitation of text mining techniques for ontology construction.