Advantages of Shared Data Structures for Sequences of Balanced Parentheses

We propose new data structures for navigation in sequences of balanced parentheses, a standard tool for representing compressed trees. The most striking property of our approach is that it shares most of its internal data structures for all operations. This is reflected in a large reduction of space, and also in faster navigation times. We exhibit these advantages on two examples: succinct range minimum queries and compressed suffix trees. Our data structures are incorporated into a ready-to-use C++-library for succinct data structures.