A Formalism of XML Restructuring Operations

We present a set of primitive restructuring operators that, when combined, are sufficiently powerful to convert an XML document under a source schema into an XML document under an arbitrary target schema. We initially define the operators at the schema level, and then show how each operator induces a corresponding transformation on any XML document under the schema. Finally, we note that our operators can be implemented in a high level language such as XQuery, and thus our approach can be used as the basis for automating the conversion of one XML document to another XML document.