The XSD-Builder Specification Language: Toward a semantic view of XML Schema Definition

Speaker:	Dr. Joseph Fong
		Department of Computer Science
		City University of Hong Kong

Title:		"The XSD-Builder Specification Language:
		 Toward a semantic view of XML Schema Definition"

Date:		Monday, 7 November 2005

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

ABSTRACT:

Since relational database is not an efficient way for data explosion,
electronic transfer of data and electronic business on the web, XML
(Extensible Markup Language) becomes the data standard on the Internet.
However, the XML schema of XSD (XML Schema Definition) is complex and
difficult (if not impossible) to specify the user data requirements
constraints. We introduce a methodology of using XSD-Builder for creating
an XSD in a simple and efficient format on the web. We apply a data
semantic oriented language solution to the problem. An XSD can be loaded
into an XML database system. In our approach, the data semantics of
participation, cardinality, generalization, aggregation, categorization,
and n-ary relationships can be preserved in a transformed XSD. The
XSD-Builder is a user friendly language for specifying the data semantics
of an XSD. An XML tree model is also used as an XML conceptual schema to
visualize the data semantics of XSD in a hierarchical structure. As a
result, a user can draw an XML tree model for the data requirements and
specifies the data semantics by using XSD-Builder according to the XML
tree model diagram. The result is a generated XSD ready to be compiled and
run for specifying an XML database.

Keywords:	XML Schema Definition, XSD-Translator, XSD-Builder,
		XML tree model, Constraints Specification Language,
		Data Semantics Oriented Language.



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Biography:

Dr Joseph Fong is a visiting scholar at Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology. He is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science
Department of City University of Hong Kong. His research interests are
Database, Data Warehousing, Data Mining and XML technologies. He holds a
US patent on Universal database, authors a book on "Information Systems
Reengineering" by Springer Verlag and publishes many International
academic journal papers in his research area. He is currently an editorial
board member of International Journal on Web Information Systems and is
the honorable founder chairman of Hong Kong Web Society.  Dr Fong
graduated from Sunderland University with a Ph.D. degree in Computing in
1993.