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

Thomas Bosch (M.Sc.) thomas.bosch@gesis.org | http://boschthomas.blogspot.com

Problem • 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 XSDs describe domain data models • In many cases, XSDs are already defined and can be re-used

Main Research Question How to sped up the time-consuming process designing domain ontologies based on already available XSDs?

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 • Derivation of domain ontologies vs. creation of generated ontologies • OWL (more expressive power) vs. RDFS generated ontologies

Proposed Approach Derive Domain Ontologies using SWRL rules

XSDs to Generated Ontologies

Evaluation • User study to compare traditional manual and proposed approach • Define and classify typical tasks • Define measurement methods • Derive domain ontologies of multiple and differing domains