A Framework for Integrating XML Transformations

XML is the de facto standard for representing and exchanging data on the World Wide Web and XSLT is a primary language for XML transformation. Integration of XML data is an increasingly important problem and many methods have been developed. In this paper, we study the related and more difficult problem of how to integrate XSLT programs. Program integration can be particularly important for server-side XSLT applications, where it is necessary to generate a global XSLT program, that is a combination of some initial XSLT programs and which is required to operate over a newly integrated XML database. This global program should inherit as much functionality from the initial XSLT programs as possible, since designing a brand new global XSLT program from scratch could be expensive, slow and error prone, especially when the initial XSLT programs are large or/and complicated. However, it is a challenging task to develop methods to support XSLT integration. Difficulties such as template identification, unmapped template processing and template equivalence all need to be resolved. In this paper, we propose a framework for semi-automatic integration of XSLT programs. Our method makes use of static analysis techniques for XSLT and consists of four key steps: i) Pattern Specialization, ii) Template Translation, iii) Lost Template Processing and iv) Program Integration. We are not aware of any previous work that deals with integrating XML transformations.