X-CM: Extending Entity Relationship Model for Conceptual Modeling in XML Databases

The emergence of XML as the de facto for data exchange in the World Wide Web and the increase popularity of XML in the business application have urge momentum research on way to generate a well-formed XML document to store and maintain it in the databases. Thus, a good schema such as XML schema is undeniable needed in order to define the syntax and structure of the XML instance to ensure data integrity. Nevertheless, schemas serve as logical model rather than conceptual model where semantics of the underlying document are hardly expressed. As such, in this paper, the authors proposed X-CM, a new conceptual modeling for XML as the mechanism to model components of XML conceptually and to express the underlying semantic explicitly. First, the authors reviewed the semantics and structure of conceptual modeling of existing approaches. Then, the authors proposed their X-CM modeling construct and implemented X-CM in a university based scenario. Lastly, the authors summarized the evaluation result and comments provided by the XML database experts and evaluators based on the authors proposed model.