SJSON: A succinct representation for JavaScript object notation documents

摘要

The massive amounts of data processed in modern computational systems is becoming a problem of increasing importance. This data is commonly stored directly or indirectly through the use of data exchange languages, such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), for human-readable platform agnostic access. This paper focuses on describing and analyzing SJSON, a library that explores succinct representations of JSON documents as a means to achieve reduced memory usage of files in main memory, and to permit the compression of JSON files stored in disk. In SJSON we represent the document structure with succinct trees, as opposed to the usual pointer-based implementation. Furthermore, the remaining raw data are organized in arrays of attributes and values. Attributes are stripped of redundancies and stored in a simple contiguous array, while values are represented through a bit string indexed array. The scheme here proposed is then evaluated with respect to a number of metrics comparing its performance with popular libraries, anssd possible improvements to the representation are then presented.