TransM: A structured document transformation model

Abstract

We present in this paper a transformation model for structured documents. TransM is a new model that deals with specified documents, where the structure conforms to a predefined data type. In particular TransM works on XML document conforming to a document type definition DTD. We present the different components of our model and we put the point on the kernel part of TransM which is the transformation rules. We show the strengths and the weaknesses of some recent transformation approaches and we prove that TransM can perform not only those simple and direct transformations but also complicated ones, especially, those who handle recursive appearance in the structure of the modeled documents, where elements may appear at any level of deepness in the hierarchical composition of the document structure, whilst the problem is not clearly resolved in the existing transformation models. We propose TransM as a general model for structured document transformation and we explore in more details its specification core that carries out document transformations.