Maintaining schema versions compatibility in cloud applications collaborative framework

Abstract

The eXtensible Markup 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. Many organizations and content providers have been publishing and sharing their information through XML and its standard schemas. With the increased popularity of cloud application deploymentit is a common practice to share data and its schemaswhich underpins integrated applications within the cloud environment. Cloud environment fosters collaboration more than in the traditional distributed systemthrough i) a direct access and update of shared files using a web-based collaboration packages and ii) a seamless access by new technologies such as smartphones and tablet devices. Since the heterogeneous schemas stored in the cloud tend to evolve across timethere is a need to handle their versions adequately. In this paperwe propose a central framework the can be deployed in a cloud environment to aid schema developers and standard groups to track XML Schema changesmaintain versions compatibilityand help in the enhancement of a particular schema version. The framework is prototyped as a tool (called XSM) to store and retrieve versioned XSDs and evaluate them based on the quality indicators defined for this purpose. The versioning correctness and functionality of the proposed indicators are examined through a set of XSDs.