Schema-Based Compression of XML Data with Relax NG

Abstract

The extensible markup language XML has become indispensable in many areas, but a significant disadvantage is its size: tagging a set of data increases the space needed to store it, the bandwidth needed to transmit it, and the time needed to parse it. We present a new compression technique based on the document type, expressed as a Relax NG schema. Assuming the sender and receiver agree in advance on the document type, conforming documents can be transmitted extremely compactly. On several data sets with high tag density this technique compresses better than other known XML-aware compressors, including those that consider the document type.