1. Reusing XML Schemas' Information as a Foundation for Designing
Domain Ontologies
Thomas Bosch (M.Sc.)
thomas.bosch@gesis.org | http://boschthomas.blogspot.com
Problem Main Research Question
• Traditionally, ontology engineers work in close collaboration with How to accelerate the time-consuming process designing DOs
domain experts to design domain ontologies (DOs) which requires based on already available XSDs?
lots of time and effort
• DOs as well as XSDs describe domain data models Hypothesis
• In many cases, XSDs are already defined and can therefore be The effort and the time delivering high quality DOs using the
reused to design DOs proposed approach is much less than creating DOs completely
manual
Proposed Approach Derive DOs using SWRL rules
Benefits
XSD and OWL follow different modeling goals, the mapping transports • Process designing DOs from scratch is sped up significantly
only XSDs' information, and generated ontologies (GOs) are not • All XSDs' information (terminology, syntactic structure of XML docs)
conform to the highest quality requirements of DOs is reused in GOs
 GOs are not immediately useful • GOs' RDF representations can be published in the LOD cloud and
 domain experts and ontology engineers enrich GOs with additional linked to other RDF datasets
domain-specific semantic information in form of DOs • All XML data conforming to XSDs can be imported automatically as
DOs' instances
Map XSDs to GOs • GOs and DOs can be maintained in a fast way
• <xs:element name="VariableName" ... /> • Detect technical and content-related data models' weaknesses
 VariableName ⊑ Element
• <xs:element name= "VariableName" ... />
Novelty of Approach
• Based on XSD meta-model
 VariableName ⊑ name_Element_String.{'VariableName'}
• Does not extract semantics out of XSDs
• <xs:attribute ref="lang"/>
• Transformation on terminological and assertional knowledge level
 Lang-Reference ⊑ ref_Attribute_Attribute.Lang
• Automatic transformation of XSDs and XML docs
• <xs:element name="VariableName" type="NameType"/>
• More expressive power of OWL instead of RDFS GOs
 VariableName ⊑ type_Element_Type.NameType
• <xs:extension><xs:attribute name="translated"/><xs:attribute Limitations
name= "translatable"/></xs:extension>  Extension1 ⊑ • Prerequisite: XSDs
contains_Extension_Attribute.(Translated ⊔ Translatable) • Not suitable use cases (e.g. when XSDs do not represent the
domain knowledge correctly or when XSDs are technically not well
Use Cases designed)
• To proof approach's generality: any XSDs and corresp. XML docs
can be converted to GOs and their RDF representations, as all XSD Evaluation
meta-model's components are covered • To verify the hypothesis
• Generic test cases: derived from XSD meta-model • User study to compare traditional manual and proposed approach
• Domain-specific use cases: Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) (define measurement methods)
ontology; projects: MISSY, da|ra, LOD pilot project, SOFISwiki • Derive DOs of multiple and differing domains