Discovering and Maintaining Semantic Mappings between XML Schemas and Ontologies

There is general agreement that the problem of data semantics has to be addressed for XML data to become machine-processable. This problem can be tackled by defining a semantic mapping between an XML schema and an ontology. Unfortunately, creating such mappings is a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone task. To alleviate this problem, we present a solution that heuristically discovers semantic mappings between XML schemas and ontologies. The solution takes as input an initial set of simple correspondences between element attributes in an XML schema and class attributes in an ontology, and then generates a set of mapping formulas. Once such a mapping is created, it is important and necessary to maintain the consistency of the mapping when the associated XML schema and ontology evolve. In this paper, we first offer a mapping formalism to represent semantic mappings. Second, we present our heuristic mapping discovery algorithm. Third, we show through an empirical study that considerable effort can be saved when discovering complex mappings by using our prototype tool. Finally, we propose a mapping maintenance plan dealing with schema evolution. Our study provides a set of effective solutions for building sustainable semantic integration systems for XML data.