Research On Transformation From XML Documents To OWL Documents

As the W3C standard document formation for writing and exchanging information on the web, XML has reached a wide acceptance as data exchange format language between internal and external organizations. More and more XML documents have been used for data exchange between internal and external enterprises, such as Web services, Semantic Web etc. However, as the foundation of Semantic Web, XML itself only provides syntax but little meanings of XML document content. For machine to access automatically, the XML document must contain formal semantics.In the hierarchical structure of Semantic Web, the ontology layer is designed as the semantic layer. An ontology is commonly defined as an explicit, formal specification of a shared conceptualization of a domain data model. With the definition of shared common knowledge, an ontology can promote the communication between human and machine, thereby achieve data exchange on the semantic level. OWL is the ontology description language recommended by W3C?. Therefore, it has become one of the research topics in Semantic Web to transform an XML document into an OWL ontology.This paper presents a mapping method called X2R-R2O, which includes two parts. First, a relational model is constructed from XML document metadata with the X2R mapping. Next, the related concepts in the entity-relation model and relation among concepts and also the restriction on them are extracted, and then an OWL ontology is generated with the R2O mapping. So, an XML document is transformed into an OWL document. With the validation checking tool used, the generated OWL document confirms with the OWL Full syntax. So, XML data can be lifted from the syntactic level to the semantic level.