Using XML Schema Subtraction to compress electronic payment messages

Abstract

SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is an XML-based standard that defines the format for electronic payments between the member states of the European Union. Besides the advantages that come with an XML-based format, XML data involves one mayor disadvantage when storing and transferring large amounts of data: the storage overhead caused by the verbose structure of XML data. Therefore, we propose a compressed format for SEPA data that helps to overcome this problem. We propose to apply XML Schema Subtraction (XSDS) to the SEPA messages, such that all information that is already defined by the SEPA Schema can be removed from the SEPA messages. This compressed format allows executing navigation and updates directly on the compressed data, i.e. without prior decompression. The compression leads to a reduction of the data size of down to 11% of the original message size on average. In addition, queries can be evaluated on the compressed data directly with a speed that is comparable to that of ADSL2. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.