Enhanced XML Schema semantic suggestion / XML Schema 1.1

I post this in response to the XML Schema 1.1 request. I am working on
XML based middleware technologies for ubiquitous devices. 
For that purposes we needed an "enhanced" semantic for XML-Schema's 
All-, derivation-by-extension- and minimal-/maximal occurrence 
cardinalities concepts.

To get an idea of the enhanced semantic consider the following 
XML Schema fragment:

<xs:complexType name="Address">
 <xs:complexContent>
  <xs:restriction base="xs:anyType">
   <xs:all>
    <xs:element name="Name" type="xs:anySimpleType" 
                minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" /> 
    <xs:element name="Firstname" type="xs:anySimpleType" 
                minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" /> 
    <xs:group ref="Contact" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="4" />  
   </xs:all>
  </xs:restriction>
 </xs:complexContent>
</xs:complexType>

<xs:group name="Contact">
 <xs:choice>
  <xs:element name="Mail" type="xs:anySimpleType" /> 
  <xs:element name="Phone" type="xs:anySimpleType" /> 
 </xs:choice>
</xs:group>

As you may notice the above fragment is invalid regarding to 
XML Schema (1.0) because of the <xs:group ref="Contact" minOccurs="0"
maxOccurs="4" /> statement within the <xs:all> declaration.

For validation against these XML-Schemas we developed a new class of
finite 
state machines, called Cardinality Constraint Automata. These automata
allow the efficient validation of the above XML Schema. Other benefits
of these automata are semantic enhancements for XML-Schema's
derivation-by-
extension- and minimal-/maximal occurrence cardinalities concepts.
 
We'd like to present our work to the XML Schema developing 
public. We therefore built a prototype which demonstrates the 
semantic enhancements. The prototype is available via 
http://www.swarms.de/software. A paper describing the CCA 
technology is available at http://www.swarms.de/publications/cca.pdf.


I'm looking for your comments, 
Merry Christmas,

Florian Reuter

Received on Thursday, 19 December 2002 09:15:19 UTC