The Design Of An Ontology-Based XML Information Integration System And The Research Of Its Key Technologies

With the rapid development of Web technology, many new applications such as E-Business, Data Exchange and Information Query are emerging quickly, and the requirement for information representation and interchanging is growing. With its own advantages, XML has been widely used and become the de facto standard of the Web Data representation and interchanging. However, XML can not interpret the semantic of the data it carries. And this makes it very difficult to integrate heterogeneous XML data sources. As the formal specification of a shared conceptualization, the ontology makes it possible to resolve the XML Information Integration on the semantic level. Thus, the ontology-based information integration of XML data becomes a significant research topic.On the basis of examing the fundamental features of XML language, this paper studies the concept, function, building methodologies and descreption languages of ontology. Then, this paper brings forward a design and implementation of an Ontology-based XML Information Integration System: OB-XIIS, and shows how to use ontology as global schema in XML information integration to reach our goal. OB-XIIS adopts OWL—the newly published W3C recommendation of Semantic Web Ontology Language—as the ontology construction language; an XQuery variant as the ontology query language; and XQuery as the XML data resource query language. With an instance to illustrate how the system works as a whole and to explain every module's function of OB-XIIS, this paper brings out a reasonable and practical way to integrate heterogeneous XML data sources.