CompreX—An XML Compression Utility

CompreX is a specialized XML compression utility designed to reduce the negative aspects of XML. As many DoD and other large scale digital information systems migrate to XML-based technology, XML's inherent liability, that is, its tendency to inflate raw data 3 to 10 times the original size, has become a great concern. Mobile and embedded device in particular will require more memory, more processing power, and more batteries to power an XML-enabled platform. Network bandwidth consumption will also become a scarce commodity. Targeted specifically for Web Services, CompreX integrates transparently in a messaging framework, compressing XML data on-the-fly requiring no modification to user applications. Leveraging both the syntactic structure of XML data as well as semantic information contained in an XML Schema, CompreX can significantly compress XML data. Context aware compression mechanisms provide compression ratios that represent a seven to ten-fold increase in compression performance over traditional compressors.

This US Army sponsored Phase II SBIR effort successfully built a prototype of XML compression software (CompreX) that demonstrated the feasibility of using schema aware, context aware and document differencing to provide better compression performance than traditional general purpose compressors. The prototype demonstrated CompreX's potential within the SINCE experiment to provide future military systems with scalable XML compression software.