Schematron

Which Schematron Do You Need?

Schematron is an open standard, and most of its implementations are open source. When you go shopping to download your free implementation of Schematron over the Internet, you'll find out that there are several flavors available!

Schematron was developed in Taiwan in late 1999 by Rick Jelliffe. For the next five years, many different implementations were created for different platforms, and the community of Schematron users and enthusiasts contributed many enhancements and implementation methods. The technique of using XPath assertions over data models expressed as XML has been widely adopted for many other problem areas, including programming, checking for Java, and semantic data using the RDF data model.

Schematron 1.5

The most common version of Schematron is known as "Schematron 1.5".

Schematron 1.5 was built from a proposal by Rick Jelliffe and takes into account the number of contributions from a community of Schematron enthusiasts. Its home is on the Academia Sinica Computing Centre web site at http://xml.ascc.net/schematron/. It was designed to be implemented easily as a two-stage XSLT 1.0 transformation:

1. A first generic transformation that can be downloaded from the Schematron web page transforms Schematron schemas into XSLT transformations.

2. These transformations are run against instance documents to validate them.

This design decision means that you can use Schematron 1.5 wherever you have a XSLT processor available. That deployment simplicity has ...