A framework of inlining algorithms for mapping XML document type definitions to relational schemas

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has become the format of data exchange for the Internet. From the beginning of this emerging standard there has always been a need to store this XML content in the database for retrieval and query. Storing of XML documents can be done in a native XML database, object oriented database or a relational database. Among these approaches a popular way is to store them in relational databases to take advantage of their maturity. To reduce the number of joins for XML querying, several inlining algorithms have been proposed to map XML Document Type Definitions (DTD) to relational schemas. These algorithms generally include three steps: (1) simplify the DTD, (2) use the simplified DTD to create a DTD graph, and (3) use the DTD graph to generate the relational schemas. In this research, contributions have been made to all the three steps. This research elaborates a more complete inlining algorithm that handles issues not clearly considered by existing algorithms.