A Survey to Conceptual Modeling for XML

XML has become the de facto standard for representing and interchanging information in web-based applications. And conceptual modeling approaches, such as EER and UML, have been widely applied to illustrating data structure and relationships in traditional database. However, there is no standard methodology for designing XML data at conceptual leveI. In this paper, we give a survey to conceptual modeling for XML in terms of the basic models they employ. Most of them are based on well-established conceptual models. Some novel conceptual models are proposed to capture the hierarchical structure of XML. A set of requirements for a good conceptual models for XML are concluded. In particular, we emphasize the two phases modeling methodology and the importance of data semantics.