Methodology for data conversion from xml documents to relations using extensible stylesheet language transformation

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been used for data-transport and data-transformation while the business sector continues to store critical business data in relational databases. Extracting relational data and formatting it into XML documents, and then converting XML documents back to relational structures, becomes a major daily activity. It is important to have an efficient methodology to handle this conversion between XML documents and relational data. This paper aims to perform data conversion from XML documents into relational databases. It proposes a prototype and algorithms for this conversion process. The pre-process is schema translation using an XML schema definition. The proposed approach is based on the needs of an Order Information System to suggest a methodology to gain the benefits provided by XML technology and relational database management systems. The methodology is a stepwise procedure using XML schema definition and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to ensure that the data constraints are not scarified after data conversion. The implementation of the data conversion is performed by decomposing the XML document of a hierarchical tree model into normalized relations interrelated with their artifact primary keys and foreign keys. The transformation process is performed by XSLT. This paper will also demonstrate the entire conversion process through a detailed case study. © 2009 World Scientific Publishing Company.