XML Views: Part 1

Abstract

The exponential growth and the nature of Internet and web-based applications made eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the de-facto standard for data exchange and data dissemination. Now it is gaining momentum in replacing conventional data models for data representation. XML with its self-describing hierarchical structure and its associated XML Schema (XSD), provide the flexibility and manipulative power needed to accommodate distributive, heterogeneous data. But due to XML’s non-scalar, set-based semistructured nature and ambiguity, traditional data design models lack the capability to conceptually model, design and successfully implement a data model. Due to this, organising and extracting information of XML documents with their conceptual and operational semantics intact is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a generic, language independent conceptual view mechanism for XML documents (XML View) to enhance conceptual modelling and designing capabilities of XML based information systems. We focus view definition at the conceptual level and the semantics required in accommodating such view mechanism at this higher level of abstraction.