Data conversion from relational to XML using JDOM and XML schema definition

Abstract

Relational database plays a vital role in companies because of its well expression of relationship and huge amount of investment on it. For Extensible Markup Language (XML), it becomes popular in industries because it can build a standard for data exchange on the internet. So, there should have a solution for consolidating two databases system so that companies can use both database in a convenience way without duplicate investment. Data conversion between relational database and XML database is one of the solutions. It can build a middle ware to perform the data conversion from relational database to XML documents under fast and convenience environment. However, the storing format of two databases is different. Moreover, there are many different data semantics among relational tables. So, data cannot be simply converted. In my project, I handled six data semantics including participation, cardinality, aggregation, generalization, categorization and n-ary relationship. The relational schema will be translated to XML schema definition (XSD) with correct data constraints. Then, based on the XSD, relational data translated to a JDOM tree which is represented as XML document and then inserted into XML database.