Ontology-based Access to Heterogeneous XML Data

Lule Ahmedi, Pedro José Marrón, Georg Lausen

Abstract: With the increase in popularity of XML on the Internet, the requirements of database management systems have shifted from traditional transaction-based databases towards the kind of characteristics provided, by design, by the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. At the same time, the design and use of a middleware to provide a common querying interface to XML-based systems has become an increasingly relevant research problem, encouraged by the fact that XML has become the de facto standard for information interchange on the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to describe the capabilities of our LDAP-based middleware that is able to transparently incorporate arbitrary XML documents, address structural discrepancies among XML data sources, and provide support for the resolution of semantic mismatches under a common framework, thanks to the simplicity, coherence and uniformity of the LDAP model.