ADC '02 Proceedings of the 13th Australasian database conference - Volume 5
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Extensible Markup Language (XML) is for organizing and structuring data and will be used increasingly by the bioinformatics community to store and transmit structured data over the internet. The user-defined choice of elements and attributes, the type of data contained within them, and the way elements nestle within each other determines the structure of the document. This information is recorded as a set of rules in a schema. One way of designing an XML document, and its associated schema, is to use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to display the data objects and their relationships graphically. We take some data from the bioinformatics literature and apply the method of Routledge, et al [1] to illustrate the data model using UML diagrams. The advantage of this approach is that the process of choosing the elements and attributes (which is an issue in XML) and the design of the schema are unified. Furthermore, the fact that the first step in the process is done at the conceptual level allows domain experts like biologists to participate in the choice of the elements and attributes. No technical knowledge of XML Schema is required.