XML Vocabulary Modeling

["Doyle, Michael J" <michael.j.doyle@gs.com>]

Hi,

I'm researching XML vocabulary modeling methodologies am looking for
opinions on such.

It seems that many projects model their entities and messages in UML, then
create DTD and XML Schemas from the model. FpML, RIXML, SwiftML, ISO 15022,
etc. follow this pattern. From UML models, so the story goes, you can also
easily create classes in Java or C++. And these translations from model to
code can be automated or facilitated by tools.

But most of these projects started before W3C XML Schemas were a full
recommendation. In the XML world of today, I can easily find tools that can
display an XSD in a graphical, object-oriented form, convert an XSD to a DTD
and bind it to Java classes. And I can find them for less than many UML
products.

How valuable is UML for this process now? Are the translation tools better
than what's available for XML (pointers to such tools would be appreciated)?
Or can XML Schema serve effectively as the "model"?

Thanks in advance,
- Mike