Extracting Structural Semantic Features for XML Data

A common limit of most existing methods that manage XML structure information is that they do not consider an important charac- teristic of XML data: the semantic meanings that might be associated to the markup tags. In this paper, we study how to map structure information available from XML elements into semantically related concepts in order to support the generation of semantic features of XML structural type. This is substan- tially accomplished by using a lexical ontology knowledge and employing a word sense disambiguation method to select the most appropriate mean- ing for each element contextually to its respective XML path. Experiments with data from various application domains show good results, suggesting that our approach can be eectively used to generate structural semantic features.