Semi-indexing semi-structured data in tiny space

Semi-structured textual formats are gaining increasing popularity for the storage of document collections and rich logs. Their flexibility comes at the cost of having to load and parse a document entirely even if just a small part of it needs to be accessed. For instance, in data analytics massive collections are usually scanned sequentially, selecting a small number of attributes from each document. We propose a technique to attach to a raw, unparsed document (even in compressed form) a "semi-index": a succinct data structure that supports operations on the document tree at speed comparable with an in-memory deserialized object, thus bridging textual formats with binary formats. After describing the general technique, we focus on the JSON format: our experiments show that avoiding the full loading and parsing step can give speedups of up to 12 times for on-disk documents using a small space overhead.