XML schema quality index in the multimedia content publishing domain

Abstract

The structure and content of XML schemas impacts significantly the quality of data respectively documents, defined by XML schemas. Attempts to evaluate the quality of XML schemas have been made, dividing them into six quality aspects: structure, transparency and documentation, optimality, minimalism, reuse and integrability. XML schema quality index was used to combine all the quality aspects and provide a general evaluation of XML schema quality in a specific domain, comparable with the quality of XML schemas from othe r domains. A quality estimation of an XML schema based on the quality index leads to a higher efficiency of its usage, simplification, more efficient maintenance and higher quality of data and processes. This paper addresses challenges in measuring the level of XML schema quality within the publishing domain, which deals with challenges of multimedia content presentation and transformation. Results of several XML schema evaluations from the publishing domain are presented, compared to general XML schema quality results of an experiment, that included 200 schemas from 20 different domains. The conducted experiment is explained and the state of data quality in the publishing domain is presented, providing guidelines for necessary improvements in a domain, dealing with multimedia content.