A Java-based framework to support computer-assisted creation of structured XML documents

In the management of document-based information, the structure of the document itself is very important. In the XML world you can use a DTD (Document Type Definition) or XMLSchema to define that structure. But not everything can be described (and forced) through a DTD while XMLSchema is not yet widely supported. For our MENTOR project - a document-based university management system - we needed a tool to support the creation and storage of official-meeting transcripts. These documents are strongly structured, so strongly that in this case a simple DTD was not enough. We decided to build a custom tool to fulfill our need. In this article we show the different solutions we had to study to let users create XML documents with some considerations about the formalization level of each solution. Then we present and motivate our choice.