Mining XML Schemas to Extract Conceptual Knowledge

One of the promises of the Semantic Web is to support applications that easily and seamlessly deal with heterogeneous data. Most data in the Web, however, is in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, but using XML requires applications to understand the format of each data source that they access. To achieve, then, the benefits of the Semantic Web involves transforming XML into the Semantic Web languages, OWL (the Web Ontology Language) and RDF (the Resource Description Framework), a process that generally has manual or only semi-automatic components. In this paper we present a set of patterns that enable the direct, automatic transformation from XML Schema into RDF and OWL, allowing the direct use of much XML data in the Semantic Web. We focus on a possible logical representation of the first language and present an implementation, including a comparison with related works.