An X-ray on web-available XML schemas

XML has conquered its place as the most used standard for representing Web data. An XML schema may be employed for similar purposes of those from database schemas. There are different languages to write an XML schema, such as DTD and XSD. In this paper, we provide a general view, an X-Ray, on Web-available XSD files by identifying which XSD constructs are more and less frequently used. Furthermore, we provide an evolution perspective, showing results from XSD files collected in 2005 and 2008. Hence, we can also draw some conclusions on what trends seem to exist in XSD usage. The results of such study provide relevant information for developers of XML applications, tools and algorithms in which the schema has a distinguished role.