Abstract. The present web is existing in the HTML and XML formats for persons to browse. Recently there is a trend towards the semantic web where the information can be can be processed and understood by agents. Most of the present research works focus on the translation from HTML to semantic web, but seldom on XML. In this paper, we design a method to translate XML to semantic web. It is known that ontologies play an important role in the semantic web, therefore firstly, we propose a genetic model to organize ontologies, and based on this model, we use three steps, viz. semantic translation, structural translation and schematic translation, to translate XML to semantic web. The aim of the paper is to facilitate the wide use of semantic web.