Member Submission - Note

Date: Jan. 5, 1998
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-XML-data-0105/
Source Author or Organization: Microsoft, ArborText, University of Edinburgh, DataChannel, Inso Corporation

The XML-Data submission provides an XML-based schema vocabulary for defining the data model for a document class, as an alternative to DTDs. (Schemas enable XML document types to be described using XML syntax, rather than SGML's DTD syntax.)

Schemas define the characteristics of classes of objects. This paper describes an XML vocabulary for schemas, that is, for defining and documenting object classes. It can be used for classes which as strictly syntactic (for example, XML) or those which indicate concepts and relations among concepts (as used in relational databases, KR graphs and RDF). The former are called "syntactic schemas;" the latter "conceptual schemas." XML-Data schemas can also be used to describe the row types and key relationships of a relational database.