Developing XML Documents with Guaranteed "Good" Properties

Many XML documents are being produced, but there are no agreed-upon standards formally defining what it means for complying XML documents to have "good" properties. In this paper we present a formal definition for a proposed canonical normal form for XML documents called XNF. XNF guarantees that complying XML documents have maximally compact connectivity while simultaneously guaranteeing that the data in complying XML documents cannot be redundant. Further, we present a conceptual-model-based methodology that automatically generates XNF-compliant DTDs and prove that the algorithms, which are part of the methodology, produce DTDs to ensure that all complying XML documents satisfy the properties of XNF.