Composition of XML-transformations

Electronic commerce seeks improvements of business processes by aggressively exploiting the enormous increases in information exchange offered by digital telecommunication systems. XML is seen as an important step to overcome the problems of heterogeneity of data exchange between different systems, albeit the structural as well as the semantic heterogeneities are not even touched by this standard: The same information is encoded quite differently in XML by different information systems. Therefore, to let these information systems communicate and interoperate, it is necessary to transform XML documents. We propose a new way to generate such transformations based on the XSLT language which was originally developed for rendering XML documents. We aim to improve the way XSLT transformations are developed by binding XSLT transformers to the document type descriptions of source and target documents and introducing and exploiting the concepts of composition and specialization for DTD as well as for transformers in XSLT, resulting in highly improved efficiency and quality.