X-CM: A Conceptual Modeling for XML Databases

Most organizations are using XML as the data exchange format over the Internet. Consequently, some are beginning to store data in the native XML database. Unfortunately, as to date, there is no suitable mechanism for intuitively modeling the components of XML conceptually. The area of designing conceptual modeling techniques, for XML is still not adequately explored in literature. As such, in this paper, we proposed a novel XML conceptual modeling technique, which we named as X-CM (XML Conceptual Modeling). We explored the possibility of extending Entity-relationship modeling in the following aspects: 1) expressing the containment semantics more explicitly, and 2) specifying the data dependencies in multiple contexts.