1 The XML and Semantic Web Worlds: Technologies, Interoperability and Integration. A Survey of the State of the Art * Nikos Bikakis1 • Chrisa Tsinaraki2 • Nektarios Gioldasis2 • Ioannis Stavrakantonakis2 • Stavros Christodoulakis2 1 National Technical University of Athens, Greece & Institute for the Management of Information Systems, "Athena" Research Center, Greece. e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Lab. of Distributed Multimedia Information Systems & Applications, Technical University of Crete, Greece. e-mail: {chrisa, nektarios, gstavrak, stavros}@ced.tuc.gr Abstract In the context of the emergent Web of Data, a large number of organizations, institutes and companies (e.g., DBpedia, Geonames, PubMed ACM, IEEE, NASA, BBC) adopt the Linked Data practices and publish their data utilizing Semantic Web (SW) technologies. On the other hand, the dominant standard for information exchange in the Web today is XML. Many international standards (e.g., Dublin Core, MPEG-7, METS, TEI, IEEE LOM) have been expressed in XML Schema resulting to a large number of XML datasets. The SW and XML worlds and their developed infrastructures are based on different data models, semantics and query languages. Thus, it is crucial to provide interoperability and integration mechanisms to bridge the gap between the SW and XML worlds. In this chapter, we give an overview and a comparison of the technologies and the standards adopted by the XML and SW worlds. In addition, we outline the latest efforts from the W3C groups, including the latest working drafts and recommendations (e.g., OWL 2, SPARQL 1.1, XML Schema 1.1). Moreover, we present a survey of the research approaches which aim to provide interoperability and integration between the XML and SW worlds.