Metaschema provides a common, format-agnostic modeling framework supporting schema, code, and documentation generation all in one.
Current modeling technologies (i.e. XML Schema, JSON Schema, Schematron) are:
- Uneven in their modeling expressiveness and validation capability;
- Unable to express a single model that applies to all supported formats;
- Bound to specific formats (i.e., XML, JSON, YAML); and
- Time-consuming and labor-intensive when maintaining multiple format-specific models.
In addition to these basic challenges, there is a need to:
- Express and validate cross-instance relationships;
- Generate parsing code in multiple programming languages;
- Support lossless content conversion between all supported formats; and
- Maintain format-specific documentation.
To address the challenges above, Metaschema supports automated:
- Code and documentation generation;
- Robust rules-based, format agnostic validation capabilities; and
- Content conversion between supported formats (i.e., XML, JSON, YAML).
Metaschema achieves this with:
- A modeling abstraction that unifies the modeling and validation capabilities of existing schema and validation technologies.
- Tools that automatically generate code, schemas, documentation, and format-appropriate content converters from Metaschema-based models.
- Metaschema Specification
- Getting Started with Metaschema
- Metaschema Use Cases
- Metaschema XML Schema and XML and JSON Data Type Schemas
- A Java implementation provides Metaschema parsing, data instance validation and parsing, content conversion, Java code generation, and XSD and JSON schema generation capabilities.
- An XSLT implementation provides data instance validation, content conversion, documentation generation, and XSD and JSON schema generation capabilities.
Maintainer: ITL OSCAL Team, NIST Information Technology Laboratory, Computer Security Division, Secure Systems and Applications Group
Email us: metaschema@nist.gov
Chat with us: Gitter OSCAL/metaschema