1. Reusing XML Schemas‘ Information as a
Foundation for Designing Domain Ontologies
Doctoral Consortium
International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012)
12.11.2012
Thomas Bosch
M.Sc. (TUM)
PhD student
http://boschthomas.blogspot.com
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

2. Motivation
• Traditionally, ontology engineers work in close collaboration
with domain experts to design domain ontologies manually,
which requires lots of time and effort
• Domain ontologies as well as XML Schemas describe domain
data models
• In many cases, XML Schemas are already defined and can be
re-used
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3. Main Research Question
How to sped up the time-consuming process
designing domain ontologies based on already
available XML Schemas?
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4. Proposed Approach
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5. Evaluation
• User Study
• Compare traditional manual and proposed semi-automatic
approach
• Define and classify typical tasks
• Define measurement methods
• Derive domain ontologies of multiple and differing domains
• Proof generality of approach
• Domain-specific use cases
• Generic test cases
• Derived from XSD metamodel
• Any XSD and XML can be translated
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6. http://boschthomas.blogspot.com
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7. Backup
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8. research questions
• How to sped up the time-consuming process designing
domain ontologies based on already available XML Schemas
(RQ1)?
• How to ensure that unexceptionally any XML Schemas can be
converted to generated ontologies using the same
transformation rules (RQ2)?
• How to map XML Schema meta-elements to a generic
ontology (RQ3)?
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9. research questions
• How to map XML Schemas to generated ontologies (RQ4)?
• How to map XML document instances to RDF representations
of generated ontologies (RQ5)?
• How to expand the information initially accessible in
generated ontologies with additional domain-specific
semantic information (RQ6)?
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10. research questions
• How to create domain ontologies (OWL + RDF) as efficient as
possible (RQ7)?
• Use cases (RQ8)?
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11. Novelty of Approach
• Based on XSD metamodel
• Extract vocabulary, terminology, syntactic structure vs.
semantics
• Transformation on terminological and assertional
knowledge level
• Automatic vs. manual or semi-automatic transformation of
XSD/XML
• Semi-automatic derivation of DOs vs. creation of GOs
• OWL (more expressive power) vs. RDFS GOs
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