When conceptual model meets grammar: A dual approach to XML data modeling
Data & Knowledge Engineering
Complete and reusable description of message structural constraints in web service interfaces
Computer Standards & Interfaces
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Many organizations are facing enormous challenges today in trying to integrate a wide range of software systems. These systems span the functional areas within an organization, as well as, the multitude of organizations and countries involved in a business process. To address the needs of information integration a number of organizations are developing standards to define the information units that will be shared. Many of these standards are an application of the XML family of software standards, hence the proliferation of content standards or xML standards. To ensure quality in the emerging content standards, the organizations producing them also define guidelines for how the XML standards, especially XML Schema, will be used in a given context. These guidelines are published as sets of Naming and Design Rules (NDR). Unfortunately, a single set of these rules do not meet the needs of the wide range of standards being developed. Moreover, the guidelines are being published as prose (e.g., English text) rather than in a computational form. To address these shortcomings and allow for the more rapid creation of high quality NDR, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is developing a set of tools to facilitate NDR development. The tools support the development of executable tests to support NDR, collaboration on the use of those tests, the grouping of tests into testing profiles, as well as, the association of NDR documentation with executable tests. The grouping mechanism allows rules to be selected from a larger set for use in a particular context. By also providing for the association of guidelines with executable tests, a testing suite can be quickly assembled. Furthermore, the pool of guidelines and their tests can be collaboratively developed, thereby leveraging resources and creating higher quality test sets in the end. The report describes a framework for tools to support the development of NDR for XML Schema. The tools aid in producing high quality XML schemas using a standards-based approach to information integration. The tools are based on open standards, making them highly configurable and reusable. The three primary functional areas of the tools described are authoring, testing, and sharing.