Searchable compression of office documents by XML schema subtraction

Abstract

Starting with Microsoft Office 2007, the Office Open XML file formats have become the default file format of Microsoft Office. As each day a lot of office documents have to be stored and transferred, reducing the document size will yield a benefit when storing and transferring these files. We present a compressed format for XML-based office documents that omits that data from an office document that is already defined by the Office Open XML format. Our evaluation shows that our compressed format reduces the - already compressed - office documents to a data size down to 41% of the original document size. Furthermore, for search operations tested in our evaluation, searching is faster on our compressed office documents than it is on the original documents. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.