Title: How to accelerate the process of designing domain ontologies based on XML schemas

Authors: Thomas Bosch; Brigitte Mathiak

Addresses: GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, 68159 Mannheim, Germany ' GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, 68159 Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: Domain ontologies and XML Schemas serve to describe domain data models although they follow different modelling goals. By lifting the syntactic level of XML documents and validating XML Schemas to the semantic level of OWL ontologies and their RDF representations in an automatic way, all the information located in the XML Schemas of the domains can be reused by ontology engineers and domain experts to design domain ontologies from scratch. As this approach supports all components of the XML Schema metamodel, it is ensured that unexceptionally any XML Schema can be converted into a generated ontology. As structures of generated ontologies might be quite complex, domain ontologies can be inferred automatically by means of SWRL rules. Saved time and effort can then be used to add domain-specific semantic information, not covered by underlying XML Schemas, to the domain ontologies.

Keywords: ontology design; domain ontologies; generated ontologies; XML schemas; XSD; XML schema metamodels; semantic web; linked data; OWL; RDF; SWRL rules; metadata; semantics; domain data modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2013.057760

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2013 Vol.8 No.3, pp.254 - 266

Received: 01 Aug 2012
Accepted: 14 May 2013

Published online: 14 Oct 2014 *

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