Automated Ontology Creation using XML Schema Elements

Ontologies are commonly used to represent formal semantics in a computer system, usually capturing them in the form of concepts, relationships and axioms. Axioms convey asserted knowledge and support inferring new knowledge through logical reasoning. For complex systems, the process of creating ontologies manually can be tedious and error-prone. Many automated methods of knowledge discovery are based on mining domain text corpus, but current state-of-the-art methods using this approach fail to consider properly semantic data embedded in XML schemata in complex systems. This paper proposes a mapping method for identifying relevant semantic data in XML schemata, automatically structuring and representing it in the form of a draft ontology. Concepts, concept hierarchy and domain relationships from XML schema are mapped to relevant parts of an OWL ontology. A part-ofspeech tagging method extracts domain relationships from schema annotations. This mapping method can be applied to any system that has a well-annotated XML schema. We illustrate our process with the preliminary results obtained when creating a command and control to simulation (C2SIM) draft ontology from an XML schema. Keywords—OWL, XML Schema, Part of Speech tagging, Command and Control, Interoperability