A Knowledge-Based Approach to Reducing Complexity of Maintaining Semantic Constraints in Data Exchange and Integration

Different enterprises may adopt different XML syntax to represent similar business data. For the same XML dialect, its different versions may differ in syntax too. For effective business data communication and integration, the XML documents must be syntactically valid and semantically meaningful. Generally, DTD and XSD are used to specify XML syntax, and Schematron is used to specify semantic constraints of business data. Since the same type of business data is often represented by many different syntaxes, we need to maintain a large growing pool of different versions of semantic constraints in Schematron, which could easily lead to chaos and consistency errors. We provide a knowledge-based approach by extending OWL to support the effective concept-level representation of semantic constraints on business data, so that we only need to design and maintain one Schematron document for similar business data constraint thus reduce complexity.