On Change Detection of XML Schemas

Change detection of XML data has emerged as an important research issue in the last decade, however the majority of change detection algorithms focuses on XML documents rather than schemas. This is because documents that contain data are deemed more significant than the schema itself. This paper looks at the problem from a different perspective by maintaining XML schema (XSD) changes and providing a more meaningful description of the detected changes. Our proposed algorithm XS-Diff uses the technique of storing XML Schema versions in a relational database where the detection and storage of delta changes are employed on relational tables. We demonstrate the correctness of the proposed algorithm through a set of synthetic data. Also, our experimental results show that XS-Diff, is a more meaningful method than other change detection methods for providing deltas that are optimal or near-optimal and semantically correct.