Designing and Maintaining XML Integrity Constraints

In this paper, we present a new language for XML integrity constraints. In contrast to other languages for XML integrity constraints, we propose to specify constraints at the conceptual level independently of technical details of a respective XML format. This brings several advantages. The constraint expressions are easier to specify and understand and they are also more resistant to changes in the XML format. We also show how a conceptual expression can be translated to an equivalent expression at the logical XML level using XPath which can be used for validating XML documents.