Analysing complexity of XML Schemas in geospatial web services

Abstract

XML Schema is the language used to define the structure of messages exchanged between OGC-based web service clients and providers. The size of these schemas has been growing with time, reaching a state that makes its understanding and effective application a hard task. A first step to cope with this situation is to provide different ways to measure the complexity of the schemas. In this regard, we present in this paper an analysis of the complexity of XML schemas in OGC web services. We use a group of metrics found in the literature and introduce new metrics to measure size and/or complexity of these schemas. The use of adequate metrics allows us to quantify the complexity, quality and other properties of the schemas, which can be very useful in different scenarios.