A Survey on Transformation Methods of XML Documents to Ontologies

Nowadays, the great amount of information is stored in many data resources such as relational databases, XML documents and so on. Semantic Web is aimed to make current Web information semantic. The information of data resources should be accessed semantically, to reach this goal, it should be organized and stored under the ontology. Ontology is a key and important concept in Semantic Web. Generally, ontology is a common understanding of a domain. On the other hand, completely manually ontology construction is a time­-consuming, labor intensive and prone to errors process. Therefore, an approach is required to at least semi-automatically extract ontology from data resources. Transformation approach is a convenient one to extract ontologies from various data resources. Hence, Interoperability among extracted ontologies resulted from transformation approach via mediation ontology approaches is possible and false interpretations of information with regard to different conceptualizations of a given domain is solved. In this paper, we definitely explain the transformation approach, gather the most notable methods in this field and classify them under two categories. Subsequently, we surveyed the transformation methods and finally select the best one in each category.