A top down approach to semi-structured database design

XML has become the preferred format for representing and exchanging structured and semi-structured data on the Web. The XML Schema language is widely used for defining and validating highly structured XML instance documents. While text-based languages, such as XML-Schema, offer great advantages for data interchange on the Internet, graphical modeling languages are widely accepted as a more visually effective means of specifying and communicating data requirements for a human audience. This paper uses object-relationship-attribute model (ORA-SS) as a conceptual graphical model for designing XML-Schemas. To facilitate this process we introduce an XML representation for ORA-SS Schema Diagram and define an XML-Schema to validate the XML documents; and then we present an algorithm to generate an XML-Schema automatically from ORA-SS conceptual model. We have implemented our algorithm using the XSL transformations.