Transformation of XML Schema to Object Relational Database

Abstract

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is fast emerging as the dominant standard for describing data and interchanging data between various systems and databases on the Internet. It offers the XML schema definition language as formalism for defining the syntax and structure of XML documents, providing rich facilities for defining and constraining the content of XML documents. Nevertheless, to enable efficient business application development in large-scale e-commerce environments, XML needs to have databases to keep all the data. Hence, it will inevitably be necessary to use methods to describe the XML schema in the Object-Relational Database (ORDB) formats. In this chapter, we present the way to transform the XML encoded format, which can be treated as a logical model, to the ORDB format. The chapter first discusses the modeling of XML and why we need the transformation. Then, a number of transformation steps from the XML schema to the Object-Relational Logical model and XML to ORDB are presented. Three perspectives regarding this conceptual relationship (aggregation, association and inheritance) and their transformations are mainly discussed.