An Extensible Constraint Markup Language: Specification, Modeling, and Processing
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SVG versionTrack: Core Technologies, Knowledge Management, Integration
Audience Level: High Level/Technical View
Time: Thursday, November 18 at 09:00
Keywords: XML Constraints, Semantic Validation, Semantic Constraint Modeling, XML Schema, OCL, XSLT
Abstract:
With the mature of e-business on the Internet, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is rapidly becoming the industry standard for business-to-business (B2B) data integration. While Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and XML Schemas can be used to specify and validate syntactic constraints on XML documents, currently there are no effective languages or tools for specifying and validating dynamic semantic constraints on XML documents.
We conduct a critical review of the existing XML constraint languages and classify the types of semantic constraints based on their forms. We propose a new XML constraint language, eXtensible Constraint Markup Language (XCML), which is more powerful than the current constraint languages by better supporting the specification of dynamic and inter-relationship constraints. Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Object Constraint Language (OCL) are adopted to support visual specification and automatic generation of XCML instance documents and XML Schemas, which are further used by our reusable XSLT stylesheets to support both semantic and syntactic XML document validation.
The technologies proposed can be used in B2B data integration, XML data management, data warehousing, and decision support systems for various industry domains.
