MECHANISMS FOR RANKING XML TAGS

XML Schema design often involves repeating work already done by others. Schema designers benefit from a system that helps designers choose from a set of candidate XML tags already in use by others. Mechanisms are described for providing decision support in the selection of candidate XML tags based on tags that are in use within a collection of XML documents. The approaches presented include a static analysis of tags which reflects the use of such tags in documents considered to be of high quality. A real-time analysis of tags considers the shared context of candidate XML tags with the set of tags already selected for use in the schema under design. Measure values resulting from the static analysis and/or the real-time analysis are used to derive an overall ranking measure for each candidate tag, and the candidate tags may be displayed in rank order of their measure values.