Experiences in Computer Assisted XML-based Modelling

Understanding the structure and functionality of the domain of interest and representing them in an intuitive, conceptual form is crucial in any effort to manage information about the domain. We adopt the view that documents contain information about the domain of application in a structural form. However, the structure in documents is often loose and modelling and management tools are seldom used in connection with document. In an ideal situation, all the organization’s documents are stored in an electronic form in the same database. In that case we say these documents form the organization’s document database. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is now a widely accepted format for electronic documents. XML document type definitions are used to require a specific structure of documents. In our opinion, creating document type definitions corresponds to conceptual and logical database design in a database design process. We consider that this design can be supported with a suitable set of tools that help the designer concentrate on conceptual issues instead of implementation issues. In this paper, we introduce a software called Meta Data Visualisation (MDV) that (i) assists the user with a graphical user interface in the creation of his specific document types, (ii) creates a database according to these document types, (iii) allows the user to browse the database, and (iv) uses native XML presentation of the data in order to allow queries or data to be exported to other XML based systems. Our hypothesis is that using the methodology presented in this paper we gain XML databases that are useful and relevant, and with which MDV works as a user interface.