Lightweight XML semantic integration: a global schema independent approach

In recent years XML has established its position as one of the most prevalent technologies for data exchange. However, its widespread but uncontrolled use has generated vast amounts of semantically alike but structurally different XML data sources. This hinders the ability to meaningfully synthesise related information which partially defeats the purpose of XML. Many solutions have been proposed for the integration of XML semantics, most of which rely on the creation of a global mediated schema. In this paper, we present a novel approach for decentralised integration of heterogeneous XML data sources; thus eliminating the need to create and maintain a global schema. Moreover, our solution is portable which enables the XML data sources to be semantically integrated into different systems without additional efforts. We achieved these objectives by introducing two new components namely, XML semantic schema (XMLSS) and XML semantic query language (XMLSQL), and by providing a query translation algorithm to translate XMLSQL to standard XQuery.