XML Data Compatibility from the Ground Up

Abstract

While XML may have emerged as the de facto format of data exchanged by peers, it faces the exact same evolutionary challenges that has plagued preceding lingua francas. As peers grow organically, they will inevitably generalize or specialize the XML messages they give and take, at the risk of breaking down existing relationships. If anything, change-induced outages are more likely to occur due to XML, since it promotes loose-coupling. To ensure that peers are interoperable, we lay down some ground rules of compatibility, by generally applying set theory on the extensions of the OWL classes/properties representing XML concepts/relations. Specifically, we take a hand-in-glove approach where the statements of compatibility (based on RIF-esque rules) tag along as corollaries to those of XML (based on OWL ontologies). Along the lines of two-pass compilers, we first parse the XML Infoset into an intermediate OWL representation, prior to analyzing the semantics therein.