The XQueC Project: Compressing and Querying XML

We outline in this paper the main contributions of the XQueC project. XQueC, namely XQuery processor and Compressor, is the first compression tool to seamlessly allow XQuery queries in the compressed domain. It includes a set of data structures, that basically shred the XML document into suitable chunks linked to each other, thus disagreeing with the 'homomorphic' principle so far adopted in previous XML compressors. According to this principle, the compressed document is homomorphic to the original document. Moreover, in order to avoid the time consumption due to compressing and decompressing intermediate query results, XQueC applies 'lazy' decompression by issuing the queries directly in the compressed domain.