As compared to XML DTD's, SOX dramatically decreases the complexity of supporting interoperation among heterogeneous applications by facilitating software mapping of XML data structures, expressing domain abstractions and common relationships directly and explicitly, enabling reuse at the document design and the application programming levels, and supporting the generation of common application components.
SOX builds upon XML-Data and DCD to provide a major set of enhancements to XML useful for software development (datatypes, inheritance, embedded documentation, etc.). SOX provides an alternative to XML DTDs for modeling markup relationships to enable more efficient software development processes for distributed applications. SOX also provides basic intrinsic data types, an extensible data typing mechanism, content model and attribute interface inheritance, a powerful namespace mechanism, and embedded documentation.
