Effective asymmetric XML compression

The innate verbosity of the Extensible Markup Language remains one of its main weaknesses, especially when large XML documents are concerned. This problem can be solved with the aid of XML-specialized compression algorithms. In this work, we describe a fast and fully reversible XML transform which, combined with generally used LZ77-style compression algorithms, allows to attain high compression ratios, comparable to those achieved by the current state-of-the-art XML compressors. The resulting compression scheme is asymmetric in the sense that its decoder is much faster than the coder. This is a desirable practical property as in case of many XML applications data are read much more often than written. The key features of the transform are dictionary-based encoding of both document structure and content, separation of different content types into multiple streams, and dedicated encoding of numbers and dates. The test results show the proposed transform to improve the XML compression ef...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SPE
• Authors: Przemyslaw Skibinski, Szymon Grabowski, Jakub Swacha
• Keywords: Compression Algorithms, Compression Ratio, Extensible Markup Language, SPE 2008