Specifying transformations for XML data

Transformation of XML data is especially important when XML is used as the universal data interchange format among Web-based applications or in Web publishing. To perform such transformation we can use W3C’s XSLT or XQuery, which, however, require programming skills. In the paper we propose a descriptive high-level method to specify transformation. The method is based on the idea of unranked tree transducers. We show that our approach is both descriptive and expressive, and we show how specification rules can be translated into XSLT templates for carrying out the transformation.