An MPEG-7 tool for compression and streaming of XML data

In the course of work on the MPEG-7 standard, a binary format with special features for the encoding of XML data was required. These required key features are a high data compression ratio, provision for streaming, dynamic update of the document structure and fast random access of data entities in the compressed stream. To support these features, we propose a novel, schema-aware approach which exploits the knowledge of the standardized MPEG-7 syntax definition of the encoded XML document on the encoder and decoder side. The technique is part of the MPEG-7 standard. This paper gives an overview of the coding algorithm, including a comparison to standard (XML) compression tools.