SPARQL2XQuery 2.0: Supporting Semantic-based queries over XML data

The dominant standards in multimedia content and service description, namely the MPEG-7 and the MPEG-21, have been expressed in XML Schema syntax. In addition, ontologies that capture the semantics of these standards have been developed using the semantic web languages. Since different communities in the industry and the academia work and are familiar with the Semantic Web environment or the XML environment, a Schema mapping framework and a Query mapping framework are needed that will allow querying multimedia content and service descriptions in a uniform way in both the XML and Semantic Web environments. We present in this paper SPARQL2XQuery 2.0, a framework that allows expressing semantic queries on top of XML data through the translation of SPARQL queries in XQuery syntax. SPARQL2XQuery 2.0 may work with both existing ontologies and with automatically produced ones, formed according to our XS2-OWL 2.0 transformation model. XS2-OWL 2.0 exploits the OWL 2.0 semantics and supports the new XML constructs introduced by XML Schema 1.1.