We present an approach on how to investigate what kind of semantic information is regularly associated with the structural markup of scientific articles. This approach addresses the need for an explicit formal description of the semantics of text-oriented XML-documents. The domain of our investigation is a corpus of scientific articles from psychology and linguistics from both English and German online available journals.

Because of its success, XML is increasingly used in many different application areas, and is moving towards the center of applications, evolving from an exchange format to the native data format of application components. These developments suggest that similar to other core areas of application design, XML should be designed conceptually before the implementation tasks of designing markup and writing schemas are approached. In this paper, we describe why conceptual modeling will become an important part of the XML landscape, what issues need to be addressed, and what the requirements for a conceptual modeling language for XML are.

The BECHAMEL system is a knowledge representation and inference environment for expressing and testing semantic rules and constraints for markup languages. Written in Prolog, the system provides predicates for processing the syntactic structures that emerge from a SGML/XML parser, defining object classes, instantiating object instances, assigning values to properties, and establishing relationships between or among object instances. BECHAMEL uses Prolog’s built-in capabilities to derive inferences from these facts. Part of the ongoing development of BECHAMEL involves experimenting with strategies for mapping syntactic relations to object relations and properties. This paper describes the current strategy, based on a blackboard model. Advantages of this approach include context free rules and the potential to exploit parallel processing for scalability. It has the drawback, however, of not permitting evidence to be described in ways people are likely to find natural or

Abstract. The problem that “XML formally governs syntax only- not semantics ” has been a serious barrier for XML-based data integration and the extension of current Web to Semantic Web. To address this problem, we propose the XML Semantics Definition Language(XSDL) to express XML author’s intended meaning and propose a model-theoretic semantics for XML. Consequently, XML becomes a sub-language of RDF in expressiveness and XML data can be semantics-preserving transformed into RDF data. We further discuss the semantic entailment and validity of the XML documents. 1

The lack of a standard formalism for expressing the semantics of an XML vocabulary is a major obstacle to the development of high-function interoperable digital libraries. XML document type definitions (DTDs) provide a mechanism for specifying the syntax of an XML vocabulary, but there is no comparable mechanism for specifying the semantics of that vocabulary — where semantics simply means the basic facts and relationships represented by the occurrence of XML constructs. A substantial loss of functionality and interoperability in digital libraries results from not having a common machine-readable formalism for expressing these relationships for the XML vocabularies currently being used to encode content. Recently a number of projects and standards have begun taking up related topics. We describe the problem and our own project. 1

Product data exchange is the precondition of business interoperation between Web-based firms. However, millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) encode their Web product data in ad hoc formats for electronic product catalogues. This prevents product data exchange between business partners for business interoperation. To solve this problem, this paper has proposed a novel concept-centric catalogue engineering approach for representing, transforming and comparing semantic contexts in ad hoc product data exchange. In this approach, concepts and contexts of product data are specified along data exchange chain and are mapped onto several novel XML product map (XPM) documents by utilizing XML hierarchical structure and its syntax. The designed XPM has overcome the semantic limitations of XML markup and has achieved the semantic interoperation for ad hoc product data exchange.