Automatic Generation of OWL Ontology from XML Data Source

Abstract

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) can be used as data exchange format in different domains. It allows different parties to exchange data by providing common understanding of the basic concepts in the domain. XML covers the syntactic level, but lacks support for reasoning. Ontology can provide a semantic representation of domain knowledge which supports efficient reasoning and expressive power. One of the most popular ontology languages is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It can represent domain knowledge using classes, properties, axioms and instances for the use in a distributed environment such as the World Wide Web. This paper presents a new method for automatic generation of OWL ontology from XML data sources.