Architecture of a semantic XPath processor. Application to digital rights management

Abstract

This work describes a novel strategy for designing an XPath processor that acts over an RDF mapping of XML. We use a modelmapping approach to represent instances of XML and XML Schema in RDF. This representation retains the node order, in contrast with the usual structure-mapping approach. The processor can be fed with an unlimited set of XML schemas and/or RDFS/OWL ontologies. The queries are resolved taking in consideration the structural and semantic connections described in the schemas and ontologies. Such behavior, schemaawareness and semantic integration, can be useful for exploiting schema and ontology hierarchies in XPath queries. We test our approach in the Digital Rights Management (DRM) domain. We explore how the processor can be used in the two main rights expression languages (REL), MPEG-21 REL and ODRL.