Reusing XML Schemas' information as a foundation for designing domain ontologies

Abstract

Designing domain ontologies from scratch is a time-consuming endeavor requiring a lot of close collaboration with domain experts. However, domain descriptions such as XML Schemas are often available in early stages of the ontology development process. For my dissertation, I propose a method to convert XML Schemas to OWL ontologies in an automatic way. The approach addresses the transformation of any XML Schema documents by using the XML Schema metamodel, which is completely represented by the XML Schema Metamodel Ontology. Automatically, all Schema declarations and definitions are converted to class axioms, which are intended to be enriched with additional domain-specific semantic information in form of domain ontologies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.