XML, extensible markup language is fast emerging as a data exchange standard. As a result of the flexibility offered in XML, in the form of user-defined tag sets. Several different Document Type Definitions (DTD's) can be used to represent the same object/entity. For instance, the different branches of an enterprise may be representing an object, say an email, using their own individual DTD's. The DTD's will be syntactically different but are same semantically. There is often a need to exchange data between different branches of the enterprise and this calls for a tool that translates data from a source DTD to a target DTD. Also, when only a part of data needs to be extracted into a target document with a suitable DTD, translation would be called for. Sometimes we may have to extract data from more than one source document, either with same DTD or with different DTD's, in order to build a target document. This again calls for a conversion tool. In this paper, we propose a XML data translation tool that automatically extracts data from one or more number of XML documents and builds a target XML document. A user-defined mapping specification file controls this tool. We propose the syntax for the mapping specifications and demonstrate how the translation tool can be constructed.
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