Support in the exchange of data, information, and
knowledge is becoming a key issue in current computer
technology. Ontologies may play a major role in supporting the
information exchange processes, as they provide a shared and
common understanding of a domain. However, it is still an
important question how ontologies can be applied fruitfully to
online resources. Therefore, we will investigate the relation
between ontology representation languages and document
structure techniques (schemas) on the web. We will do this by
giving a detailed comparison of OIL, a proposal for expressing
ontologies in the Web, with XML Schema, a proposed standard
for describing the structure and semantics of XML based
documents. We will argue that these two refer to different levels
of abstraction, but that, in several cases, it can be advantageous to
base a document schema on an ontology. Lastly, we will show
how this can be done by providing an translation procedure from
an OIL ontology to a specific XML Schema. This will result in a
schema that can be used to capture instances of the ontology.
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