XML Schema is the language used to define the structure of messages exchanged between OGC-based web service clients and providers. The size of these schemas has been growing with time, reaching a state that makes its understanding and effective application a hard task. A first step to cope with this situation is to provide different ways to measure the complexity of the schemas. In this regard, we present in this paper an analysis of the complexity of XML schemas in OGC web services. We use a group of metrics found in the literature and introduce new metrics to measure size and or complexity of these schemas. The use of adequate metrics allows us to quantify the complexity, quality and other properties of the schemas, which can be very useful in different scenarios.
Exchanging structured business documents is inevitable for successful collaboration in electronic commerce. A prerequisite, for fostering the interoperability between business partners utilizing different business document standards, is a mapping between different standards. However, the effort involved in creating those mappings is hard to estimate. For example, the complexity of standardized formats is one crucial aspect affecting the effort of the mapping process. Therefore, a notion of complexity is desirable for both, manual as well as automatic mapping processes. For this reason we develop an initial set of metrics, based on well established metrics for XML Schema, allowing to analyze the complexity of business document standards. Having such metrics at hand allows estimating the complexity and hence the mapping effort of a business document standard, prior to the actual mapping process. We demonstrate the complexity metrics on three different business document standards from the electronic commerce domain.