A Novel Dynamical Compression of XML Data for Transmission on Networks

Extensible Markup Language (XML) [1] derives from SGML [2], which is an ISO standard (ISO 8879). It uses plain text to encode a hierarchical set of information using verbose tags to allow the XML document to be understood without any special reader. XML also allows the use of Schema documents [3] and Namespaces [4] to create a well defined contract describing what a single XML document means and to what it applies. The self-contained nature of XML and the strong contract provided by its schemas have made XML a very important data format for capturing information declaratively and semantically. It is used as a way to store and transport information, as a way of preparing data for publishing [5], translating to another language or structure [5] and even as a message layer between computer systems [6]. It is increasingly finding itself used in a number of different business markets, such as managing financial communications [7, 8]; and XML is often considered a useful tool for building internationalized business languages to allow better communication across vendors, platforms, and languages [9]. XML is often used on Internet and intranet facing webservers to request and deliver webservices used in wider applications. This is seeing wider adoption through the development of Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) [10] to take advantage of the Service Orientated Architectures (SOAs) [11] that are being implemented in many organisations. To make matters worse, SOAs wrap XML document requests and responses within a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) envelope describing what the XML document is for and detailing any errors that may have occurred during the SOA operation [6, 12, 13].