An OWL ontology query approach based on XML

To handle OWL ontology queries, this paper proposes an XML-based OWL ontology query approach. The proposed approach uses XML to express OWL DL ontologies and uses XQuery in XML to query OWL DL ontologies expressed by XML documents. For the purpose of creating XML knowledge base from OWL DL ontologies, the description logic reasoner is used to extract OWL ontology information. In order to ensure accurate and complete query answers, reasoning and querying are applied simultaneously for the created XML knowledge base. The reasoning supports Tbox reasoning and Abox reasoning, and the querying supports XQuery query and nRQL query. For the nRQL query, its formal conversions to the XQuery query are presented. Our approach is verified with experiments and compared with existing OWL ontology query approaches. It is shown that our approach has a good comprehensive performance in the running time and the recall, and thus is feasible. © 2013 by Binary Information Press.