A Classification for Comparing Standardized XML Data

The increasing amount of XML data provided via the Web imposes a large need for efficient data exchange and import. This has led to an increasing interest in XML standards within a large number of areas. However, in most application domains there are several competing standards capturing the same kind of information. This work presents a method for classification and comparison of standards within an area. The method can be applied to XML-standards in any domain. We report on the situation for two different areas, molecular interactions and digital television and use our method to compare the standards within the two domains. The classification gives information on how similar the standards are, in terms of information content and structure. This information is useful for deciding which kind of methods are interesting for providing automatic matching and efficient development of tools for import of standardised data