XML and Semantics

Since the early days of introducing eXtensible Markup Language (XML), owing to its expressive capabilities and flexibilities, it became the defacto standard for representing, storing, and interchanging data on the Web. Such features have made XML one of the building blocks of the Semantic Web. From another viewpoint, since XML documents could be considered from content, structural, and semantic aspects, leveraging their semantics is very useful and applicable in different domains. However, XML does not by itself introduce any built-in mechanisms for governing semantics. For this reason, many studies have been conducted on the representation of semantics within/from XML documents. This paper studies and discusses different aspects of the mentioned topic in the form of an overview with an emphasis on the state of semantics in XML and its presentation methods.