This course covers all details of the W3C XML Schema specification

Students should be experienced with XML and Software development.

XML Schema Overview and Fundamentals

• Introduce the concepts of schemas
• Introduce W3C XML Schema and understand the structure of the recommendation
• Understand the process of validity assessment
• Understand the concept and role of the Post Schema Validation Infoset (PSVI)
• Understand the structure of an XML Document
• List and explain the 12 different Schema components
• Understand the difference in local and global definitions and declarations
• Discuss different schema styles (russian doll, salami slice etc)
• Understand the concept of names for definitions and declarations
• Introduce the concept of symbol spaces
• Understand the relation with XML Namespaces
• Be able to make basic element and attribute declarations
• Understand the difference between simple types and complex types
• List the predefined types
• Be able to define basic simple types using different derivations (atomic/restriction, list and union)
• Be able to define basic complex types
• Understand the different content models of complex types
• Introduce complex type extension and restriction
• Introduce compositors (all, sequence and choice)
• Introduce particles
• Understand how to control namespace of local declarations (attributeFormDefault and elementFormDefault)
• Understand how to refer to schema documents from XML documents (and the potential problems with that)
• Understand how to specify type information inside your XML Document using xsi:type
• Understand nil values
• Understand how to include, redefine and import other schemas

Simple Type Definitions

• Understand the difference between value space and lexical space
• Understand the details of the built-in datatypes
• Understand how to derive by restricting to create your own types
• Understand facets
• Explain the different string types
• Explain how to derive string types
• Explain the different number types
• Explain how to number string types
• Explain the different date, time and duration types
• Explain how to derive from different date, time and duration types
• Understand the semantics of the constraining facets per type

The pattern facet

• Explain regular expressions in XML Schema
• List some important differences with other Perl like regular expression languages
• Understand the exact syntax of a regular expression (branches, pieces, quantifiers)
• Explain the different atom types (characters, escape classes, expression classes etc)
• Explain the different quantifiers to control atom occurrence
• List the different character classes and understand the difference between them
• List the escape character classes
• List the multi-character escape classes (Perl groups)
• Understand the wildcard multi-character escape class
• Understand the category escape
• Explain Unicode categories and blocks
• Explain how to define you own classes using character class expressions
• Understand how these relate to set-theory
• Explain positive classes, negative classes and character class subtraction
• Understand how to combine these to create other models

Complex type Definitions

• Understand the details of creating complex types
• Understand the possible derivations per content type model
• Understand the details of extending simple content models
• Understand the details of restricting simple content models and the rules
• Understand the details of extending complex content models
• Understand the details of restricting complex content models
• Understand the consistent particle rule
• Understand the unique particle attribution (UPA)
• Understand the semantics and differences of the different compositors (all, choice etc)
• Understand different compositor combinations
• Understand particles
• Understand element and attribute group definitions
• Understand how to redefine them in a different schema
• Understand substitution groups
• Understand how to block the use of substitution groups
• Understand element and attribute wildcards (xs:any and xs:anyAttribute)
• Understand uniqueness, keys and references
• Introduce the basics of XPath 1.0 needed for identity constraints