Handling markup overlaps using OWL

A lot of applications handle XML documents where multiple overlapping hierarchies are necessary and make use of a number of workarounds to force overlaps into the single hierarchy of an XML format. Although these workarounds are transparent to the users, they are very difficult to handle by applications reading into these formats. This paper proposes an approach to document markup based on Semantic Web technologies. Our model allows the same expressiveness as XML and any other hierarchical meta-markup language, and, rather than requiring complex workarounds, allows the explicit expression of overlapping structures in such a way that search and manipulation of these structures does not require any specific tool or language. By simply using mainstream technologies such as OWL and SPARQL, our model – called EARMARK (Extremely Annotational RDF Markup) – can perform rather sophisticated tasks with no special tricks.