How to structure and access XML documents with ontologies

The current hype on Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) produced hundreds of XML-based applications. Many of them offer document type definitions (DTDs) to structure actual XML documents. Access to these documents relies on special purpose applications or on query languages that are closely tied to the document structure. Our approach uses ontologies to derive canonical structures, i.e., DTDs, to access sets of distributed XML documents on a conceptual level. We will show how the combination of conceptual modeling, inheritance, and inference mechanisms with the popularity, simplicity, and flexibility of XML leads to applications providing a broad range of high-quality information.