A semantic approach to data translation: A case study of environmental observations data.

•We propose an ontology-mediated approach for environmental data translation.•We outline the principles underlying the design of a mediating ontology, and show the development of such an ontology.•We propose a declarative formalism for representing spreadsheet-to-ontology mappings, and give an algorithm for the mapping evaluation.•We propose a declarative formalism for representing ontology-to-XML mappings, and give an algorithm for the mapping evaluation.•We have developed an ontology-mediated spreadsheet-to-XML translation tool, and showed its effectiveness with real environmental observations data.