Global InformationFast Infoset information
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Fast Infoset (or FI) is an international standard that specifies a binary encoding format for the XML Information Set (XML Infoset) as an alternative to the XML document format. It aims to provide more efficient serialization than the text-based XML format.
FI is effectively a lossless compression, analogous to gzip, for XML, except that while the original formatting is lost, no information is lost in the conversion from XML to FI, and back to XML. While the purpose of compression is to reduce physical data size, FI aims to optimize both document size and processing performance.
The Fast Infoset specification is defined by both the ITU-T and the ISO/IEC standards bodies. FI is officially defined in ITU-T Rec. X.891 and ISO/IEC 24824-1, and entitled Fast Infoset. The standard was published by ITU-T on May 14, 2005, and by ISO on May 4, 2007. The Fast Infoset standard document can be downloaded from the ITU website. Though the document does not assert intellectual property (IP) restrictions on implementation or use, page ii warns that it has received notices and the subject may not be completely free of IP assertions.
A common misconception is that FI requires ASN.1 tool support. Although the formal specification uses ASN.1 notation, the standard includes Encoding Control Notation (ECN) and ASN.1 tools are not required by implementations.
An alternative to FI is FleXPath.[1]
- ^ Amer-Yahia, Sihem, Laks VS Lakshmanan, and Shashank Pandit. "FleXPath: flexible structure and full-text querying for XML." Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data. ACM, 2004.