Spring MVC 3 servlet.xml .. what is the use of the initial lines ?

Question

In Spring MVC 3, what is the purpose of defining these lines

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd"&gt;

in the <servletName>-servlet.xml file.

Answer 1

Those are XML Schemas. The Spring documentation does quite a good job describing the schemas mentioned.