Incremental updates on compressed XML

Abstract

XML tree structures can be effectively compressed using straight-line grammars. It has been an open problem how to update straight-line grammars, while keeping them compressed. Therefore, the best previous known methods resort to periodic decompression followed by compression from scratch. The decompression step is expensive, potentially with exponential running time. We present a method that avoids this expensive step. Our method recompresses the updated grammar directly, without prior decompression; it thus greatly outperforms the decompress-compress approach, in terms of both space and time. Our experiments show that the obtained grammars are similar or even smaller than those of the decompress-compress method.