High-level Operations for Creation and Maintenance of Temporal and Conventional Schema in the tauXSchema Framework

tauXSchema is a framework for constructing and validating time-varying XML documents through the use of a temporal schema. This latter ties together a conventional schema (i.e., a standard XML Schema document) and its corresponding logical and physical annotations, which are stored in an annotation document. Conventional schema and logical and physical annotations undergo changes to respond to changes in user requirements or in the real-world. Consequently, the corresponding temporal schema is also evolving over time. In this paper, we study operations which help designers for changing such schema components. Indeed, we propose three sets of high-level operations for changing temporal schema, conventional schema, and annotations. These high-level operations are based on the low-level operations proposed in our previous work [11, 12, 14, 15, 16]. They are also consistency preserving and more user-friendly than the low-level operations. Besides, we have divided the proposed operations into basic high-level operations (i.e., high-level operations that cannot be defined by using other basic high-level operations) and complex ones.