Inheritance transformation of XML schemas to object - relational databases

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. 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 inevitable be necessary to use methods to describe the XML schema in the Object Relational Database (ORDB) formats. The paper discusses the modelling of XML and why we need the transformation. Then, a number of transformation steps from the XML schema to the ORDB, with the emphasis on the transformations of inheritance relationships are presented. Two perspectives regarding this conceptual relationship (single and multiple inheritance) and their transformations are mainly discussed. © Springer-Verlag 2003.