Q:

What is the act of creating objects from XML data called?

In the context of loading an XML file, what's a good name for the step in which you create internal data structures (be they objects, structs, or whatever) to hold the data in memory? What do you usually call the other steps?

LOAD, OPEN, or READ the xml, by opening a file.
PARSE the xml, with some XML parser.
??? the xml, creating data structures.

Options that have come to mind for step 3 are: handle, create_foobars, create_foobars_from_xml, or even read, load, or parse.
One other option that comes to mind is to have an object's constructor take an xml entity, but I'm not fond of coupling the objects to the xml schema like that.

A:

Deserialization is the correct term for the "???" part of your question.  If you want to convert the object back to XML, then that would be (you guessed it) serialization.

A:

Deserialization or unmarshalling.

