Ontologies as Conceptual Models for XML Documents

Access to XML-based documents currently relies on query languages that are closely tied to the document structures, i.e. when looking for information one has to be aware of this structure and cannot easily specify the information needs conceptually. Our approach uses ontologies to access sets of distributed XML documents on a conceptual level. We integrate conceptual modeling, inheritance, and inference mechanisms on the one hand with the popularity, simplicity, and flexibility of XML on the other hand. We present an approach that defines the relationship between a given ontology and a document type definition (DTD) for classes of XML documents. Thus, we are able to supplement syntactical access to XML documents by conceptual, i.e. real semantic access.