Comparing Information Models in XML-based e-Business Standards -- A Quantitative Analysis

Standardization is an important aspect of building interoperable service-oriented e-Business solutions. XML-based standards have become increasingly popular to address some of the interoperability challenges, both in commercial and governmental organizations. However, the number of available XML-based standards has created a situation, where users have difficulties in choosing the most suitable standard, or are forced to support multiple standards at the same time. Therefore, it is important to provide tools for analyzing and comparing different standards. Existing qualitative studies have created tools that can highlight general features by manual analysis. However, in this paper, we argue that additional insights could be obtained by extracting relevant quantitative metrics of the actual XML Schema documents that the standards contain. This study analyzes three prominent e-Business document standards in terms of their quantitative metrics. Based on our results we claim that quantitative studies can enhance the use of the qualitative analysis frameworks and bring attention to useful details when comparing different standards.