Reusing XML Schemas‘ Information as a Foundation for Designing Domain Ontologies

Doctoral ConsortiumInternational Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012)

12.11.2012

Thomas Bosch

M.Sc. (TUM)PhD student

http://boschthomas.blogspot.comGESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

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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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Main Research Question

How to sped up the time-consuming process designing domain ontologies based on already available XML

Schemas?

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Proposed Approach

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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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http://boschthomas.blogspot.com

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Backup

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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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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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research questions

• How to create domain ontologies (OWL + RDF) as efficient as possible (RQ7)?

• Use cases (RQ8)?

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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