How to structure and access XML documents with ontologies

Currently dozens of XML-based applications exist or are under development. Many of them offer DTDs that define the structure of actual XML documents. Access to these documents relies on special purpose applications or on query languages that are closely tied to the document structures. Our approach uses ontologies to derive a canonical structure, i.e. a DTD, to access sets of distributed XML documents on a conceptual level.We will show how the combination of conceptual modeling, inheritance, and inference mechanisms on the one hand with the popularity, simplicity, and flexibility of XML on the other hand leads to applications providing a broad range of high quality information.