RDF RULES FOR XML DATA CONVERSION TO
OWL ONTOLOGY
Christophe Cruz and Christophe Nicolle
Laboratory Le2i, Université de Bourgogne, B.P. 47870, 21078, Dijon Cedex, France
Keywords: Ontology population, Ontology enrichment, OWL ontology, XML data, RDF rules.
Abstract: The paper presents a flexible method to enrich and populate an existing OWL ontology from XML data
based on RDF rules. Theses rules are defined in order to populate automatically the new version of the
OWL ontology. Basic rules are defined to identify elements in XML schemas and an OWL schema.
Advanced mapping rules are based on basic rules in order to define the mapping between XML schemas
elements and OWL schema elements. In addition, this flexible method allows users to reuse rules for other
conversions and populations.
1 INTRODUCTION
The knowledge defined in ontologies is used as an
index to retrieve specific data (García, 2005), to
infer new knowledge (Ha, 2005), to semantically
annotate multimedia data (Castano, 2007), to find
out Web Services automatically (Martin, 2007), or to
match knowledge with other knowledge for a more
general purpose.
XML schemas contain the knowledge of a
domain that was specified by the author. This
specification is only syntactic without any semantic
definition. This is due to the fact, that XML data are
used to exchange data between processes that were
developed for this data. In order to permit the
exploitation of the knowledge contained in XML
schemas and instances, we propose an ontology
enrichment and an automatic population process
from XML data based on a manual mapping of
XML schemas. The result of this process allows the
use of a SPARQL engine to request data on the
resulting OWL ontology, and allows the use of an
inference engine in order to deduce new knowledge.
In addition, multiple XML schemas and XML
documents are integrated in the OWL ontology
giving a single view on data.
Ontology enrichment is the activity of extending
an ontology by adding new elements (e.g. concepts,
relations, properties, axioms) (Castano, 2007). The
enrichment process consists in annotating
knowledge contained in XML schemas in order to
convert it into an OWL schema (Faatz, 2004). The
annotation process is manual. This is done by the
user who is the only one who knows which part of
the XML schema will be required in future
processes. However, Schema matching is a
manipulation process on schemas that takes two
heterogeneous schemas as input and produces as
output a set of mapping that identifies relations
between the elements of the two schemas (Thang,
2008). An automatic matching process is of value in
order to help in a semi-automatic way the annotation
of XML schemas and for rough enrichment.
The ontology population process is the activity
of adding new instances to an ontology (Castano,
2007). Presently, the data in XML document are
converted in OWL instances automatically with
rules generated from the previous “XML schema
annotation” process.
The following section discusses about previous
work done on this subject. Section three presents the
principles of our method which is based on formal
languages. Section three shows our method to enrich
the ontology by matching schemas and to populate
an ontology by an automatic process. A complete
background concerning XML Data conversion to
OWL ontology is described in (Cruz, 2008).
2 PRINCIPLE
The principle of our solution consists in making
RDF stand-off annotations and RDF links between
the schematic level of an OWL schema and the
111
Cruz C. and Nicolle C.
RDF RULES FOR XML DATA CONVERSION TO OWL ONTOLOGY.
DOI: 10.5220/0001843401110114
In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2009), page
ISBN: 978-989-8111-81-4
Copyright
c
2009 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
schematic level of several XML schemas. As a
consequence, the enriched ontology makes it
possible to link the concepts of several XML
schemas by amalgamating the attributes of common
concepts. This process has also to check the
consistency of the schema ontology in order to not
define several identical concepts and to not allow the
definition of cyclic “rdfs:subClassOf” graphs.
Figure 1: Principle of our “XSD to OWL” method.
The annotations and the links are used in a
second time to defined rules in order to
automatically populate the OWL within instances
from XML instances from XML schemas annotated.
The population has to follow some rules such as the
imitation of attribute cardinalities and unique
instances. Consequently, “advanced” rules have to
model and specify restriction on attributes. This
principle will be described in the next section.
The figure 1 presents the principle of our method
to (E)nrichment and (P)opulation of an existing
ontology. (E) is the process of enriching an ontology
and (P) is the process of populating the ontology.
These two processes use an RDF graph as rules to
enrich and to populate the ontology. The rules in
RDF are defined during the mapping process by
referring elements of XML schemas elements and
the OWL schema. In order to specify the relevant
elements of an XML schema for the enrichment
process, it is necessary to identify and mark these
elements. These marks are called “schematic marks”
and are external RDF annotations of XML
structures. These “schematic marks” are stand-off
annotations or external annotations.
The following section presents a brief
formalization of schematic marks.
2.1 Schematic Marks on XML Schema
The properties of Dyck’s languages were the subject
of studies undertaken by J. Berstel (Berstel, 2000).
According to the corollary 3.4, for each XML
language L there is only one reduced XML grammar
generating L. A reduced grammar does not have any
useless non terminal vocabulary. An XML schema
does not contain unnecessary tags, so an XML
schema does not use unnecessary non terminal
vocabulary. Consequently, an XML grammar is
necessarily its own reduced grammar. In addition, it
means that only one production rule in the XML
schema (tag <xsd:element name=”myTag” >) is
define for a tag in a XML document validated by the
XML schema. This proposal makes it possible to
introduce the concept of schematic mark.
Definition. A “schematic mark” is a mark on an
XML schema that identifies a production rule. Each
tag of an XML instance which has the same name
was produced by the same production rules.
These marks are used by the RDF rules to
identify the production rules which are the tags used
to define XML schemas. These marks are specified
with the help of the language XPath.
2.2 Schematic Marks and Semantic
An OWL grammar is also an XML grammar which
can be marked as an XML schema. However, an
ambiguous point has to be underlined. In figures 1
and 2, the OWL schema concerns the schema part of
the ontology. Indeed, the language OWL has an
XML schema in order to validate OWL documents
(http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/OWL_XML_S
chema). In this section we focus on the OWL
schema part in an OWL document. The “semantic
marks”, which are used by the RDF rules to identify
the production rules in a XML schema, use the
language XPath to identify element of the OWL
schema.
OWL uses most of the built-in XML schema
data types. References to these data types are by
means of the URI reference for the data type,
http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema.
3 ENRICHMENT
AND POPULATION METHOD
This section describes how the enrichment and the
population of an OWL ontology are managed from
XML schemas. The method is based on the
definition of schematic marks, basic mapping rules
and advanced mapping rules (e.g. fig. 2). The first
part describes the schema marking in order to
annotate the element of XML schemas. It relates to
the XML schema but also to the OWL XML
E
P
XML
Schemas
XML
Instances
OWL
Schema
OWL
Instances
RDF
Rules
WEBIST 2009 - 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
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schema. The second part presents the mapping step
which is composed of the conversion rules, the
ontology enrichment process and the ontology
population process.
3.1 Schema Marking
An RDF graph is used to annotate each XML
schema. These marks are specified to keep all
information in a graph that is required during the
mapping with the OWL schematic mark step.
Figure 2: Principle of the RDF Rules definition.
In this figure, the processes (E) and (P) are here to
show the relationships established with the RDF
rules. In fact, the main objective of the figure is to
describe the components of the RDF rules. They are
composed of the schematic marks on XML schemas
and on an OWL schema. These marks are used to
identify elements required for the mapping process.
Basic mapping rules define the schematic marks
on XML schema and OWL schema. The “bmr”
name space is used to identify the rule elements.
In addition, “bmr:xpath” defines an element in
the XML schema as does “bmr:xpathId” with
the addition that the latter acts as an identifier.
A unique property on an XML element is
welcome to define an identifier.
Advanced mapping rules use basic mapping
rules in order to define the mapping between
XML schemas and OWL. In addition, these
rules allow to define new elements in the OWL
ontology for the enrichment process and for the
population process. The name space “amr”
represents the “advanced mapping rules”
elements.
The TriG Syntax (http://www4.wiwiss.fu-
berlin.de/bizer/TriG/) is used to ease the
explanations of how we employ schematic marks
with XML schemas.
3.2 Mapping Steps
This step consists in defining a new RDF graph in
order to define relationships between XML schema
marks and OWL marks.
Conversion Rules. The conversion rules consist in
defining rules in order to convert properties that are
different from the type of the property in the
ontology and that cannot be directly copied to the
ontology “datatypeProperty”. The first kind of
conversion is simple because it is the conversion of a
simple type into another simple type. The second
kind of conversion is complex because it is the
conversion of a sub tree from the schema into a
simple type into the OWL ontology.
The conversion of complex data can also be
found in a semi-structured data. For instance, a date
can be defined in a text format and could have to be
converted in month, day and year format in the
ontology.
Ontology Enrichment. The enrichment consists in
defining relationships between XML schematic
marks and OWL schematic marks. In order to enrich
the ontology, the RDF mapping graph has to contain
information about new entities in the ontology that
have to be. The name space “amr” represents the
“advanced mapping rules” elements.
Ontology Population. In order to generate the
population of the ontology, the RDF mapping has to
be defined. To achieve this, relationships have to be
created between the RDF graph of the XML schema
marks, the RDF graph of the OWL schematic marks
and the RDF graph of the conversion rules.
The population of the ontology is an automatic
process based on the mapping graphs. To realize this
process, we have defined an algorithm that takes into
account the type bmr:dpId in order to avoid
duplicated instances of the ontology. First, it
determines all classes that have to be populated.
Second, all “datatypeProperty” of each class is
provided to the instances. In the example given in
this paper no references are given to the
management of restriction on the properties. Some
rules can be defined in order to specify which
constraints have to be verified. If those rules are not
defined then no check on restriction is applied.
RDF Rules
Basic Mapping Rules
XML
schemas
OWL
schema
Schematic
marks
Advanced Mapping Rules
Schematic
marks
E P
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4 CONCLUSIONS
We have presented a flexible method to enrich and
populate an OWL ontology for the integration of
XML data. Basic mapping rules and advanced
mapping rules are defined by users and can be
reused for other conversions and populations of
ontologies. This conversion is the first part of our
work. The second part consists in improving the
process and in giving some proposition to the user in
order to facilitate the mapping. The RDF rules can
be used to automatically extract from XML schemas
some elements that can be converted in order to help
users during the mapping. For instance, a string that
contains a date can be detected automatically to
guide the user during the conversion.
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