Acquiring OWL ontologies from XML documents
Martin J. O’Connor, Amar K. Das · 2011
Converting non-Semantic Web encoded information to ontology-based languages such as the Web Ontology Lan-guage (OWL) is an important knowledge acquisition chal-lenge. In many domains, a large amount of information is represented in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which has driven the development of general-purpose tools for converting XML to OWL. These tools suffer from a variety of shortcomings, however, including a requirement for multi-stage mapping processes and limited mapping tech-niques. A general shortcoming is that the mapping methods are not OWL-centric and thus limit the complexity of the generated OWL ontologies. To address these shortcomings, we developed an OWL-based language that can transform XML documents to arbitrary OWL ontologies. The lan-guage is based on the Manchester OWL Syntax and ex-tends it with XPath queries to support references to XML documents. Our language provides a compact, user-friendly approach for converting XML to OWL.