XML and Modeling

Data modeling is a big thing at Burton Group - a significant amount of the airtime expended in the ether around the virtual water cooler is devoted to teasing out the way that models interact, the best language for expressing such models and what characteristics best define a good model. In a way this isn't surprising - many of the people within the organization are former application or systems architects, and as such have a common belief that nonetheless is one that application developers don't necessarily share: before you write a single line of code, you should have a reasonably deep understanding of what particular piece of the real world you are attempting to model in that code.

Schematron was set up as one of a set of schema languages by ISO, specifically, ISO/IEC 19757 - Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) - Part 3: Rule-based validation - Schematron. Schematron was originally intended to be parsed by XSLT (or XSLT 2), and indeed this is still the simplest implementation, but there are also increasingly a number of stand-along Schematron validators written in Java and C##.