Measuring the Reusable Quality for XML Schema Documents

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) based web applications are widely used for data describing and providing internet services. The design of XML schema document (XSD) needs to be quantified with software with the reusable nature of XSD. This nature of documents helps software developers to produce software at a lower software development cost. This paper proposes a metric Entropy Measure of Complexity (EMC), which is intended to measure the reusable quality of XML schema documents. A higher EMC value tends to more reusable quality, and as well, a higher EMC value implies that this schema document contains inheritance feature, elements and attributes. For empirical validation, the metric is applied on 70 WSDL schema files. A comparison with similar measures is also performed. The proposed EMC metric is also validated practically and theoretically. Empirical, theoretical and practical validation and a comparative study proves that the EMC metric is a valid metric and capable of measuring the reusable quality of XSD.