Formal Evolution of XML Schemas with Inheritance

Today, web services are widely used for data exchange. The format of individual messages exchanged among them is usually described with XML schemas in WSDL documents. It is a common practice that there is not only one but a whole family of formats each, for example, tailored for a specific consumer. In such environments, the design and maintenance of the web service interfaces and, in particular, the XML schemas describing the structure of messages is not a simple task. In our previous work we developed a method based on the principles of Model-Driven Development for evolution of a family of XML schemas. It automated a portion of design and maintenance tasks to be done when a change in user requirements or surrounding environment of the system influences more XML schemas in the family. We provided a formal model of possible evolution changes and their propagation mechanism. In this paper, we extend our method with inheritance modeling. We formally extend our conceptual model and we introduce new evolution changes and update the current ones so that they keep the model in a consistent state.