Automating the transformation of XML documents

  • Authors:

  • Hong Su;Harumi Kuno;Elke A. Rundensteiner

  • Affiliations:

  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA;Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA;Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Web information and data management
  • Year:
  • 2001

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The advent of web services that use XML-based message exchanges has spurred many efforts that address issues related to inter-enterprise service electronic commerce interactions. Currently emerging standards and technologies enable enterprises to describe and advertise their own Web Services and to discover and determine how to interact with services fronted by other businesses. However, these technologies do not address the problem of how to reconcile structural differences between similar types of documents supported by different enterprises. Transformations between such documents must thus be created manually on a case-by-case basis. In this paper, we explore the problem of how to automate the transformation of XML E-business documents. We develop an integrated solution that automates as much as possible all steps of the document transformation process. One, we propose a set of schema transformation operations that establish semantic relationships between two XML document schemas. Two, we define a model that allows us to compare the cost of performing these operations. Three, we introduce an algorithm that discovers an efficient sequence of operations for transforming a source document schema into a target document schema based on our cost model. The operation sequence then is used to generate an equivalent XSLT transformation script. Experimental results indicate that our algorithm can satisfactorily discover acceptable transformations.