Evaluation of a Generic Approach for Designing Domain Ontologies Based on XML Schemas

Abstract

The process designing domain ontologies from scratch is very time-consuming and is associated with a lot of effort. In the most cases, domain experts have defined XML Schemas, describing domain data models, before ontologies have been created. Our idea is to generate ontologies out of XML Schemas automatically using XSLT transformations in a first step, and to derive domain ontologies semi-automatically using SWRL rules in a second step. We apply our approach in order to reuse the information located in the XML Schemas for the design of domain ontologies. In this paper, we aim to verify the hypothesis, that the effort and the time delivering high quality domain ontologies using the developed semi-automatic approach is much less than creating domain ontologies in a completely manual way. We have applied the individual stages of the suggested approach to multiple different data models in the academic and the industry domain. In addition to that, we show one complete use case for which the traditional approach designing domain ontologies manually and the proposed approach have been applied – the DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary, which is an ontology of the social science metadata standard Data Documentation Initiative.