Validating Quicksand: Schema Versioning in tauXSchema

The W3C XML Schema recommendation defines the structure and data types for XML documents, but lacks explicit support for time-varying XML documents or for a time-varying schema. In previous work we introduced tauXSchema which is an infrastructure and suite of tools to support the creation and validation of time-varying documents, without requiring any changes to XML Schema. In this paper we extend tauXSchema to support versioning of the schema itself. We introduce the concept of a bundle, which is an XML document that references a base (nontemporal) schema, temporal annotations describing how the document can change, and physical annotations describing where timestamps are placed. When the schema is versioned, the base schema and temporal and physical schemas can themselves be time-varying documents, each with their own (possibly versioned) schemas. We describe how the validator can be extended to validate documents in this seeming precarious situation of data that changes over time, while its schema and even its representation are also changing.