Abstract: A method, information processing system, and computer readable medium for improved representation of hierarchical documents, particularly a document encoded in Extended Markup Language (XML). The method loads a hierarchical document and stores into an addressable data structure such as a byte array. It then expands the addressable data structure lazily in response to navigations requested by a client. Nodes requested by the client are materialized, that is, they are created in memory, whereas other nodes are left unmaterialized in byte form. The method reduces the memory footprint of an XML document, as well as, improves query evaluation time and serialization time.

Abstract: A method, computer readable medium and information processing system for projecting a representation of a document in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The method dynamically creates a tree representation of an XML document based on a provided set of XPath expressions through approximate matching techniques. The projection created by the method supports all XPath axes including backward axes such as ?parent? and ?ancestor.? The execution of the set of XPath queries on the projected document is guaranteed to be the same as that of executing the XPath queries on the original document. The projected document typically occupies much less space than the original document.