XSLTGen: A system for automatically generating XML transformations via semantic mappings

Abstract

XML is rapidly emerging as a dominant standard for representing and exchanging information. The ability to transform and present data in XML is crucial and XSLT is a relatively recent programming language, specially designed to support this activity. Despite its utility, however, XSLT is widely considered a difficult language to learn. In this paper, we present a novel system called XSLTGen, an automatic XSLT Generator. This system automatically generates an XSLT stylesheet, given a source XML document and a desired output HTML or XML document. It allows users to become familiar with and learn XSLT stylesheets, based solely on their knowledge of XML or HTML. Our method for automatically generating XSLT transformations is based on the use of semantic mappings between the input and output documents. We show how such mappings can be first discovered and then employed to create XSLT stylesheets. The results of our experiments show that XSLTGen works well with a number of different varieties of XML and HTML documents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.