Abstract. Implementations that load XML documents and give access to them via, e.g., the DOM, suffer from huge memory demands: the space needed to load an XML document is usually many times larger than the size of the document. A considerable amount of memory is needed to store the tree structure of the XML document. Here a technique is presented that allows to represent the tree structure of an XML document in an efficient way. The representation exploits the high regularity in XML documents by “compressing ” their tree structure; the latter means to detect and remove repetitions of tree patterns. The functionality of basic tree operations, like traversal along edges, is preserved in the compressed representation. This allows to directly execute queries (and in particular, bulk operations) without prior decompression. For certain tasks like validation against an XML type or checking equality of documents, the representation allows for provably more efficient algorithms than those running on conventional representations. 1

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony. iii

Implementations that load XML documents and give access to them via, e.g., the DOM, suffer from huge memory demands: the space needed to load an XML document is usually many times larger than the size of the document. A considerable amount of memory is needed to store the tree structure of the XML document. In this paper, a technique is presented that allows to represent the tree structure of an XML document in an efficient way. The representation exploits the high regularity in XML documents by compressing their tree structure; the latter means to detect and remove repetitions of tree patterns. Formally, context-free tree grammars that generate only a single tree are used for tree compression. The functionality of basic tree operations, like traversal along edges, is preserved under this compressed representation. This allows to directly execute queries (and in particular, bulk operations) without prior decompression. The complexity of certain computational problems like validation against XML types or testing equality is investigated for compressed input trees. Key words: Tree grammar, compression, in-memory XML representation 1