Detecting changes in XML data has emerged as an important research issue in the last decade, but the majority of change detection algorithms focus on XML documents rather than on their schemas because documents that contain data are deemed more significant than the schema itself. However, the XML schema change detection tool is essential, especially in situations where we need to maintain related XML documents with evolving schema, sustain relational schema generated by schema-conscious approach for storing XML data and provide support for XML versioning. This paper focuses on XML Schema (XSD) changes and provides a more meaningful description of the detected changes. Our proposed algorithm XS-Diff uses the technique of storing XML Schema versions in a relational database where the detection and storage of delta changes are employed on relational tables. We demonstrate the correctness of the proposed algorithm through both synthetic and real data sets without deteriorating the execution time.
XML Schema standards often undergo several revisions to fit application requirements and business demands. In order to be successful, the development process of such standards must be collaborative allowing multiple users to work on the same schema. In this editing environment, the ability to merge branched versions of the schema is significant in certain situations. Using conventional three-way XML merging tools is not suitable for the purpose of merging XML Schema because the tree model of XML Schema is different from that of XML document. This paper deals with an essential activity enabling automatic XML Schema merging and conflict resolution based on the model of XML Schemas. We present rules for XSD merging and conflict handling, and describe how this can be achieved by combining three-way and operational-transformation approaches. Developing a prototype of our approach, we test it against a set of XSDs. Experimental results (compared to other three-way merge tools, including, 3DM and DeltaXML) show that our approach produces merged versions of high quality and reports more meaningful conflicts with respect to schema changes.
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