A communiqué from Bob Schloss (IBM Research) reports on the availability of an updated IBM XML Schema Quality Checker tool from IBM alphaWorks. The new version of this downloadable tool (Version 1.0.17, 05/21/2001) assists users who are creating XML Schemas conforming to the May 2, 2001 W3C Recommendation. The updated release "contains fixes bugs, adds a checker to verify that identity constraint definitions (Key, KeyRef and Unique) are consistent with the type of the element declaration where they appear, and updates the default stylesheet used to view the error reports. The XML Schema Quality Checker is a Java program which takes as input an XML Schema written in the W3C XML schema language and diagnoses improper uses of the schema language. Where the appropriate action to correct the schema is not obvious, the diagnostic message may include a suggestion about how to make the fix. For XML Schemas which are composed of numerous schema documents connected via <include>, <import>, or <redefine> element information items, a full schema-wide checking is performed. The tool can also be run in batch mode to quality-check multiple XML schemas in a single run." Schloss reports that the team is continuing to work on more complete checking of the consistency of identity-constraint definitions and on additional improvements; they welcome feedback and suggestions. The tool has been produced by the IBM XML Application Development team, including Achille Fokoué, Bob Schloss, Tom Gallivan, and Roberto Galnares.

Note that the IBM XML Schema Quality Checker tool is not a validating parser.

The default program behavior is to send output 'standard out'. "If the -reportAsXML filename option is used, the output can then be viewed with MS Internet Explorer, or processed through an XSLT engine such as Xalan with supplied stylesheets to create an HTML file which can viewed." The XML Schema Quality Checker tool requires the Java Runtime Environment version 1.3 or later.