Interoperability mapping from XML schemas to ER diagrams

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a de facto standard on the Internet and is now being used to exchange a variety of data structures. This leads to the problem of efficiently storing, querying and retrieving a great amount of data contained in XML documents. Unfortunately, XML data often need to coexist with historical data. At present, the best solution for storing XML into pre-existing data structures is to extract the information from the XML documents and adapt it to the data structures' logical model (e.g., the relational model of a DBMS). In this paper, we introduce a technique called Xere (XML entity-relationship exchange) to assist the integration of XML data with other data sources. To this aim, we present an algorithm that maps XML schemas into entity-relationship diagrams, discuss its soundness and completeness and show its implementation in XSLT. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.