Schema Change Operations for Full Support of Schema Versioning in the τXSchema Framework

τXSchema is a framework (a language and a suite of tools) for the creation and validation of time-varying XML documents. A τXSchema schema is composed of a conventional XML Schema annotated with physical and logical annotations. All components of a τXSchema schema can evolve over time to reflect changes in the real-world. Since many applications need to keep track of both data and schema evolution, schema versioning has been long advocated to be the best solution to do this. In this paper, we complete the τXSchema framework, which is predisposed from the origin to support schema versioning, with the definition of the operations which are necessary to exploit such feature and make schema versioning functionalities available to final users. Moreover, we propose a new technique for schema versioning in τXSchema, allowing a complete and safe management of schema changes. It supports both versioning of conventional schema and versioning of annotations, in an integrated manner. For each component of a τXSchema schema, our approach provides a complete and sound set of change primitives and a set of high-level change operations, for the maintenance of such a component and defines their operational semantics.