Evaluating the role of context in syntax directed compression of XML documents

Summary form only given. This paper proposes a new technique for tracking context to be used in a statistical code compression scheme for XML documents. Based on recursive finite state machines, the techniques employs an arithmetic coding scheme. The tradeoffs between space and compression ratio is studied by observing the effects of either using or ignoring root to leaf contexts for textual content in the associated tree structures. The scheme is syntax aware and the compressor and decompressor can be generated automatically from the document type definition (DTD) without interactive inputs from the user. A comparison of the path sensitive and path agnostic schemes for storing context for PCDATA was performed. Experimental results show that path sensitive schemes are less effective in the fixed memory model