AN IN-DEPTH SURVEY ON TRANSFORMATION OF XML INTO ONTOLOGY: CRISP AND FUZZY APPROACHES

XML is widely used as a format of representing and interchanging data. But XML mainly focuses on the syntax and structure layers, and cannot explicitly express the semantics of the data. Ontology, as a knowledge model, can well represent domain knowledge and capture their semantics. Therefore, over the years, the studies about the transformation of XML into ontologies have been becoming a key issue and attracting quite a lot of attention. At present, there are lots of literatures about the transformations of XML into ontologies. In this paper, we provide an in-depth survey on transformation of XML into ontologies, including crisp and fuzzy approaches. In our survey, we first summarize and group the existing works into two main categories, i.e., approaches of transforming XML into the already existing ontologies and newly created ontologies. Then, regarding to each constructor of XML, we further make more detailed comparisons among these approaches. Moreover, we summarize the fuzzy approaches, i.e., the existing studies on transformation of fuzzy XML into fuzzy ontologies. In addition, some in-depth discussions, analyses, and comparisons are made in our survey. This survey will help readers understand and catch key techniques about the issue of transforming XML into ontologies, including crisp and fuzzy techniques, and also can identify some future research directions.