Interpreting XML documents via an RDF schema ontology

Abstract

Many business documents are represented in XML. However XML only describes the structure of data, not its meaning. The meaning of data is required for advanced automated processing, as is envisaged in the "Semantic Web". Ontologies are often used to describe the meaning of data items. Many ontology languages, however, depend on the RDF data model and cannot describe XML data directly. This paper presents a procedure that can be used to turn XML documents into RDF statements via an RDF schema specification. This allows semantic annotation of XML documents via external RDF schema ontologies. This procedure makes the data in XML documents available for the Semantic Web.