Converting cXML Business Transactions to a Semantic Data Model

Companies are using XML-based standards in order to rapidly and accurately process electronic transactions. For example, cXML has been widely adopted in B2B integration. Major companies, such as Microsoft, Visa and FedEx are using this specification to conduct business in a daily basis. Although XML gained a strong importance in providing syntactic interoperability, we believe that companies have already started to shift for a semantic level. For example, Vodafone, Oracle and Microsoft are already implementing semantic features in their services. To support this shift, tools are available to allow companies to migrate from a syntactic to a semantic knowledge models. In this document we propose a solution to map syntactic schema to semantic models. We start with a cXML Purchase Order, create an ontology, and present the mapping that need to be establish to automatically transform an XML specification (syntactic) to an OWL representation (semantic).