XML Schema Design Approach

This paper presents a systematic XML Schema design approach which conceptually captures semantics of the problem domain at conceptual level and represents such semantics in XML Schema at schema level. At the conceptual level, objects, their inter-relationships and constraints are semantically powered by object-oriented models. At the schema level, these conceptual semantics are comprehensively represented in text-based representation of XML Schema using various schema components and design styles, each of which offers different quality characteristics. Two primary design styles in use are nesting and linking. The nesting design styles are developed based on the choice of schema components and their definition/declaration scopes (global vs. local), whereas the linking design styles use referencing facilities provided by XML Schema and other XML technologies such as XLink and XPointer. With an in-depth analysis of outstanding problems of existing approaches, the proposed design approach is motivated to help improve the quality and robustness of the XML documents in large-scale XML-based applications.