DTDs go XML schema--a tools perspective

Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are widely used to describe the structure of XML documents. The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and the Guideline Element Model (GEM) are examples from the healthcare domain. XML schemas provide another way to describe types of XML documents. In this paper we aim to advocate XML schemas from the perspective of an ANSI standard, the XML based CDA from HL7 (ANSI/HL7 CDA R1.0-2000). It turned out that existing tools do not fully exploit the knowledge contained in DTDs and XML schemas. The result of this study is a set of tools (DTD to XML Schema translator, DTD and XML schema browser, XML editor), which can be downloaded from the official W3C site and which work with any DTD and XML schema.