Nowadays, Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become the standard for data representation. It has been adopted by all of the software editors and incorporated in all of the programming languages. Nevertheless, it was not created to support the semantic web. For this purpose, new languages have been created, such as the web ontology language (OWL) and resource description framework (RDF). A user who wants to model data and create an ontology has to model it using XML and then create the ontology using either OWL or RDF. This is considered a double task. Why not use XML data for the semantic web?

This paper explores how to represent XML using ontologies. The authors present approaches for transforming XML data sources--which include the XML document itself, plus the validation, document type definitions (DTDs), and XML Schemas--into ontologies. For this purpose, the authors offer a formal definition of XML data sources and provide the detailed rules for transforming the XML data sources into ontologies.

Zhang and Ma cover all aspects of transforming XML data sources into OWL ontologies. The developed tool, XSchema2Onto, appears to provide good results; the paper will help anyone interested in this transformation to deeply test all of its features and aspects. I sincerely recommend reading this paper.