Determining the Output Schema of an XSLT Stylesheet

The XSLT language is used to describe transformations of XML documents into other formats. The transformed XML documents conform to output schemas of the used XSLT stylesheet. Output schemas of XSLT stylesheets can be used for a static analysis of the used XSLT stylesheet, to automatically detect the XSLT stylesheet, which has been used for the transformation, of target XML documents or to reason on the output schema without access to the target XML documents. In this paper, we describe how to automatically determine such an output schema of a given XSLT stylesheet, where we only consider XML to XML transformations. The input of our proposed output schema generator is the XSLT stylesheet and the schema of the input XML documents. The experimental evaluation shows that our prototype can determine the output schemas of nearly all typical XSLT stylesheets.