Moving from syntactic to semantic organizations using JXML2OWL

Today's enterprises face critical needs in integrating disparate information spread over several data sources inside and even outside the organization. Most organizations already rely on XML standard to define their data models. Unfortunately, even when using XML to represent data, problems arise when it is necessary to integrate different data sources. Emerging Semantic Web technologies, such as ontologies, RDF, RDFS, and OWL, can play an important role in the semantic definition and integration of data. The purpose of our study is to present a framework to assist organizations to move from a syntactic data infrastructure defined in XML to a semantic data infrastructure using OWL. The framework supports mappings and fully automated instance transformation from syntactic data sources in XML format to a common shared global model defined by an ontology using Semantic Web technologies. The presented framework, JXML2OWL, allows organizations to automatically convert their XML data sources to a semantic model defined in OWL.