Extracting Output Schemas from XSLT Stylesheets and Their Possible Applications

XML is nowadays the dominant standard used for data representation and exchanging. XML documents can be transformed into different formats by using the transformation language XSLT. XSLT stylesheets can be designed to present and transform XML input data in one schema in XML output data according to other schema. In this paper we describe how to compute automatically an output XML data schema given an XSLT stylesheet that is intended to produce it. The main objective of this work is to develop a tool that contributes to a better understanding of the XML transformation process. The first results, focused on bibliographic data, suggest that we can determine the output schemas of most common XSLT stylesheets.