The paper presents a flexible method to enrich and populate an existing OWL ontology from XML data based on graph-based rules. These rules are defined in order to populate automatically a new version of an OWL ontology. Today, most of data exchanged between information systems is done with the help of the XML document. Leading researches in the domain of database systems are moving to semantic model in order to store data and its semantics definition. This flexible method consists in populating an existing OWL ontology from XML data. In paper we present such a method based on the definition of a graph which represents rules that drive the populating process.