Development of an Improved Schema Entropy and Interface Complexity Metrics

Extensible Markup Language is a mark-up language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable for managing information contained in the schema documents and exchanging wide variety of elements class of data to reflect understandability and reusability. The developed schema entropy and interface complexity metrics are based on the concept from DTD metrics to measure complexity of schema on similarly structured elements, distinct structured elements and their occurrences using the Number of Attributes (NOA), Number of Equivalence Class (NOC), Frequency Occurrence of the class (FOC) and Number of Elements (NOE). A higher value of ISEM and IICM tend to a degree of high flexibility and reusability quality. The empirical validation of the metrics is applied on 40 WSDL schema files. A comparison with similar measures is also performed. The proposed ISEM and IICM metrics validated practically and theoretically. The comparative study proves the robustness of the metrics and performed better in terms of reusability and reducing lengthy code. The statistical analysis of the study showed a significant and linear relationship; and high degree of correlation.