The notion of "validation" of XML documents covers too many different aspects (structure, content, integrity, business rules, ...) to be performed by a single schema language.

Furthermore, even when a single language is used, it is often the case that documents needs to be transformed, split or normalzed to keep the schemas simpler.

The ISO DSDL project (ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 WG 1) is standardizing a set of specific and simple schema and pre validation transformation languages and a framework to define how these operations must be applied. These languages include well known technologies such as Relax NG and Schematron as well as new languages.

This talk gives a full project overview, explaining the goal of each of the parts and present the latest developments of DSDL.