An algorithm for constructing XML Schema documents from relational databases

The aim of this paper is to present a solution to automatically generate an XML schema from an existing relational database (RDB). The important goal of this translation is to enrich the source schema using semantics that might have not been clearly expressed in it, by acquiring as much information as possible about objects and relationships that exist among them. The next step is to produce an enhanced metadata model, which captures essential characteristics of target XML schema, and is suitable for translation. In details, we present translations of all constructs of an RDB into an XML Schema and integrate these into an algorithm. This process is to simplify exchange of data between different databases, practically the import of data of RDBs into XML documents. A prototype has been developed to realize the algorithm and generate target schema. To validate our proposal, we present experimental results using both schemas. The results show that the proposed algorithm is correct.