XSM -- A Tracking System for XML Schema Versions

Abstract

The extensible Mark up Language (XML) is a meta language that is widely used to provide a non-proprietary universal format for sharing hierarchical data among different software systems and application domains. Moreover, many organizations and content providers have been publishing and sharing their information through XML and its standard schemas. In this context, it is extremely important when designing new schemas or enhancing current ones, there is a mechanism to ensure that the schemas will be well-designed versions. In this paper, we develop a tool that aids schema developers and standard groups to track XML schema changes, log them, and help in the enhancement of a particular schema version. We develop a schema monitoring tool called XSM, which efficiently stores and retrieves versioned XSDs and evaluates them based on the quality indicators defined for this purpose. The quality of delta changes in the schema versions is examined through a set of synthetic XSDs.