Systematic document generation from XML Schema

Antonia Bertolino 
Italian National Research Council
http://www1.isti.cnr.it/~antonia/

Abstract:

Usage of open standard specifications is nowadays common practice in
many domains to facilitate data exchange and enhance
interoperability. One rapidly emerging technology to specify data
formats is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), which
permits to share structured context-rich data and to personalize them
with specific tags, and on the associated XML Schema notation, which
is used for establishing the rules to which XML documents should
conform.  We present an approach and a tool, called TAXI, for the
automated and systematic derivation of conforming instances from an
XML Schema specification.

The TAXI tool can be useful in differing situations, including: 

-validation of database management systems: TAXI would help to
automatically generate a bunch of valid XML instances for populating a
database for the purpose of evaluating the performance and the quality
of the associated management systems;

- inter-operability black-box testing between applications: the
generation of valid (and invalid) instances enables the automated
testing of I/O behavior. In particular, we show an example of using
TAXI to validate XSLT Stylesheets in completely automated way;

- for verifying the proper communication protocols between
web-services using SOAP-based interaction between services can be
reconducted to the corresponding XML Schemas. This is future planned
work.