Nesting-Based Relational-to-XML Schema Translation.

Abstract

this paper, we study the problems in this conversion. Especially, we are interested in finding XML schema (e.g., DTD, XML-Schema, RELAX) that best describes the existing relational schema. Having the XML schema that precisely describes the semantics and structures of the original relational data is important to further maintain the converted XML documents in future. We first present a straightforward relational to XML translation algorithm, called Flat Translation (FT). Since FT maps the flat relational model to the flat XML model in a one-to-one manner, it does not utilize the regular expression of element content models at all. Then, we present our ongoing work, called Nesting-based Translation (NeT), to remedy the problems found in FT. NeT derives nested structures from a flat relational model by the use of the nest operator so that the resulting DTD is more intuitive and precise than otherwise.