Vocabulary development for markup languages: a case study with maritime information
Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web
Managing heterogeneous models and schemas in the Waterway Information Network
dg.o '03 Proceedings of the 2003 annual national conference on Digital government research
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With the proliferation of XML vocabularies and schemas, and theadvent of semantic markup languages, registries for tags defined insuch languages are becoming increasingly important. A GeneralAccounting Office (GAO) report [11] mentions the proliferation ofoverlapping and incompatible vocabularies and structures as one ofthe most important problems in the adoption of XML in the Federalgovernment. The same report discusses various XML registries (bothplanned and in various stages of implementation) as a component ofthe solution to this problem. One part of our project involves thedevelopment of MIML (Maritime Information Markup Language) [5,7],an XML vocabulary for the marine transportation system (MTS). Giventhe large number of stakeholders, many of whom already have theirown information models (constructed independently over severalyears), creating and managing a new single information model or XMLschema covering all the diverse sources of data would require alarge investment of time and resources and be an extremely complextask for logistical and technical reasons. It was therefore decidedto incorporate existing models into MIML wherever possible. Thedistributed nature of this effort requires integrating and managingdifferent kinds of models and schemas. We present a schemamanagement and registry system that can be used as a repository forXML schemas and which possesses certain other functionality usefulfor schema designers and application area programmers. Thedistinguishing features of this system, as compared to otherregistry and repository efforts, are its ability to containinformation about information models (currently, inProtégé [3] format) as well as XML schemas, and theapplication of certain techniques based on ontology mappingresearch to the problem of detecting overlaps and conflict betweenXML schemas.