Changes to XML namespaces in XML schemas and their effects on associated XML documents under schema versioning

Abstract

In XML databases, several works have dealt with changes of basic components of XML Schemas: element and attribute declarations, simple types, and complex type definitions. However, there is no work that has dealt with changes to advanced concepts of XML Schemas like XML namespaces, local/global qualified/unqualified declarations, and schema definition styles. In this paper, we deal with XML namespace evolution. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study such a topic (and in an environment that supports schema versioning). More precisely, we propose an approach for managing changes to XML namespaces defined in XML Schemas, and their effects on XML documents that are valid to these schemas, while keeping track of all XML schema and XML instance versions.