XML Schema Matching \& XML Data Migration \& Integration: A Step Towards The Semantic Web Vision

In the past ten years, computers and especially the Internet have managed to become an important part of our everyday life. For a big part, this can be credited to the creation of the World Wide Web, which has become a new means for retrieving information, providing education, recreation, and other services faster and more efficiently. While this is true, one can say that the Web is still in a primitive state. More and more people publish web pages every day and the quality in terms of practicality and aesthetics of the pages becomes better and better, but the fact is that the Web receives only a very limited amount of help from computers. In order to bring the machines more into action, two steps must be taken: put data on the Web in a form that machines can understand or convert it into that form and, second, provide the machines with the means to process this data. XML is the first step towards this end. XML is a markup language designed to structure and carry data in a sensible way, thus helping programmers and web developers manipulate the data easily and efficiently. But XML is not the solution by itself. XML is merely a convenient way to structure and carry data it does not do anything by itself. The second step is divided into two parts: logic inference tools using RDF and ontologies, and tools that automatically perform specific tasks which are up to now manual. The first part is a very hot research area at this time, fuelled by ideas stated as early as the 1960’s for artificial intelligence. XML in coordination with RDF and ontologies are envisaged to enable computers provide high-level services by communicating with other web services and applications. The second part is concerned with providing tools to automatically perform tasks that are up to now expensive and time-consuming. Such tasks are importing/exporting data from/to XML files, automatic schema matching and migrating and integrating XML data. The realization of the Semantic Web vision depends on the implementation of the above two steps and is based on the already existing structure. ”The Semantic Web is not a separate Web, but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. [...] In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality, as machines become much better able to process and ’understand’ the data that they merely display at present” [1].