The document proposes a novel approach to speed up the time-consuming process of designing domain ontologies by reusing information from existing XML schemas (XSDs). The approach uses SWRL rules to automatically derive domain ontologies from XSDs on the terminological and assertional knowledge level, transforming the syntactic structure and vocabulary of XSDs into the more expressive OWL format. The novelty and effectiveness of the proposed approach will be evaluated by comparing it to traditional manual ontology design through a user study involving typical ontology engineering tasks on multiple domains.