A Compressed Self-indexed Representation of XML Documents

Abstract

This paper presents a structure we call XML Wavelet Tree (XWT) to represent any XML document in a compressed and self-indexed form. Therefore, any query or procedure that could be performed over the original document can be performed more efficiently over the XWT representation because it is shorter and has some indexing properties. In fact, XWT permits to answer XPath queries more efficiently than using the uncompressed version of the documents. XWT is also competitive when comparing it with inverted indexes over the XML document (if both structures use the same space).