XTOPO: An XML-Based Topology for Information Highway on the Internet

The need for interoperation and data exchange through the Internet makes XML a dominant standard language. Much work has been done on translating relational data into XML documents and vice versa. However, there is not an integrated method to combine them together as one technology for mass information transmission on the Internet. Furthermore, most XMLenabled database management systems can only translate a few relations into an XML document without data semantics constraints consideration, which is not sufficient for information highway on the Web. This paper presents a methodology, XTOPO, to transmit a relational database on the Internet using XML document as medium. XTOPO facilitates the translation from relational database to XML document and vice versa. XTOPO divides an XML document hierarchical structure into four different topologies—single sub-element (element, sub-element), multiple sub-elements (element, multiple sub-elements), group (element, group of subelements), and referral element (element, element—and captures their semantics into classification tables as a knowledge-based repository. The view of a sender company’s information in a relational database is mapped into four topological XML documents according to their data semantics constraints. The intermediate XML documents are integrated into an XML document using DOM (Document Object Model). The XML document instances are loaded into a relational database with generated Object Identity as key. The receiver company translates the XML document back to relational database for processing. The result is a mechanism of mass information transmission on the Internet for an information highway.