Ensuring XML quality and compatibility in large collections that span decades of content

One of the promises of XML applications and related technologies is the consistency and longevity of data created through their use. But meeting the promise doesn’t happen without careful curation. In practice, for large applications such as JATS, there are many users of varying skill levels, with differing understanding of the XML process. With the complicating factor that diverse users may also be using diverse versions of the standard tag set, inconsistencies tend to accumulate as these large document collections grow. Although issues such as missing DOIs, bad xrefs, duplicate IDs, invalid assets, and other structural problems in the XML may not always result in invalid documents, they are nonetheless problems for the usability and sustainability of a collection. This paper highlights automated solutions useful for fixing large amounts of JATS and BITS XML, ensuring that content is current with the latest DTDs and internally consistent across the collection.