[x3d-public] Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) for JSON - W3C working draft

Tue Feb 2 21:03:18 PST 2016

Don

You bring up some important points here that I feel have been somewhat 
muted in our messaging to the public.

I think by its nature X3D is a standard for serious 3D, that is, content 
which is necessary for mission critical situations, is difficult and 
expensive to acquire and therefore needs to be archivable (to be able to 
viewed/run decades later).

Therefore, the audience for this type of technology are from many of the 
industry verticals we have explored, ie BIM, scientific visualization, 
CAD (for multiple industries), healthcare, oil and gas, etc.  The 
decision makers in these large industries tend to be upper/C level 
personnel who analyze technology from a high level perspective.  This 
high level view obviously considers the bottom line in budgets, and the 
most expensive line item in any budget regardless of industry is labor.  
So, available workforce and what I'll call code efficiency (how many 
lines to achieve desired outcomes) is paramount.  Other details like 
compressibility, speed, availability on different platforms are also 
considered.

I think the Consortium needs to highlight these areas where the X3D 
standard can provide competitive advantage, cost savings and easy 
accessibility (the latter especially important through WebGL 
implementations like X3DOM which can be deployed via browser only, 
obviating support at the client machine level, extremely important in 
larger organizations).

Thanks for all of your good work,

Mike

On 2/1/16 11:00 PM, Don Brutzman wrote:
> The following W3C Working Draft document has been published by the EXI 
> working group.
>
>     Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) for JSON
>     http://www.w3.org/TR/exi-for-json
>
> Daniel Peintner has designed an interesting adaptation of EXI: 
> creation of a special datatype-based XML schema that allows expressing 
> any JSON structure in XML form, then subsequently taking advantage of 
> EXI compression capabilities for compactness and performance.
>
> Feedback on this working draft is welcome.  EXI for JSON provides more 
> options for X3D JSON scene authors and users.
>
> This emerging capability also bodes well for this year's planned 
> application of EXI to .x3d XML encoding, in concert with Fraunhofer's 
> Shape Resource Container (SRC), and together with XML Encryption and 
> XML Signature/Authentication.  This provides a rich set of options for 
> authors.  We expect achieve a more capable, more compact and highly 
> performant Efficient Binary Encoding for X3D.
>
> This new addition of EXI for JSON means that we'll also have have 
> multiple ways to compare compression of X3D scenes and, through 
> testing, will be able to confirm that we have indeed developed a new 
> encoding worthy of broad adoption.
>
> ================================================================================ 
>
> Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) for JSON
> W3C First Public Working Draft 28 January 2016
>
> This version:
>     http://www.w3.org/TR/2016/WD-exi-for-json-20160128
> Latest version:
>     http://www.w3.org/TR/exi-for-json
> Editors:
>     Daniel Peintner, Siemens AG
>     Don Brutzman, Web3D Consortium
>
> Copyright © 2016 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio, Beihang). W3C liability, 
> trademark and document use rules apply.
>
> Abstract.  The Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format is a compact 
> representation that simultaneously optimizes performance and the 
> utilization of computational resources. The EXI format was designed to 
> support XML representation. With a relatively small set of 
> transformations it may also be used for JSON, a popular format for 
> exchange of structured data on the Web.
> ================================================================================ 
>
>
>
> Additional background.  Past work at NPS has shown that EXI 
> consistently meets or beats JSON-based compression schemes for a wide 
> range of test cases.  Even greater EXI benefits are likely when 
> performance considerations (such as speed of decompression) are 
> compared.  These test outcomes are similar to results shown when 
> comparing EXI to .gzip or .zip compression.
>
> Thesis reference:
>
> ================================================================================ 
>
> EVALUATION OF EFFICIENT XML INTERCHANGE (EXI) FOR LARGE DATASETS AND 
> AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO BINARY JSON ENCODINGS
>
> Bruce Hill, Lieutenant, United States Navy
>
> Thesis, Master of Science in Network Operations and Technology, March 
> 2015
>
> Advisor: Don Brutzman, Department of Information Sciences. Co-Advisor: 
> Don McGregor, MOVES Institute.
>
> Abstract.  Current and emerging Navy information concepts, including 
> network-centric warfare and Navy Tactical Cloud, presume high network 
> throughput and interoperability. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) 
> addresses the latter requirement, but its verbosity is problematic for 
> afloat networks. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is an alternative 
> to XML common in web applications and some non-relational databases. 
> Compact, binary encodings exist for both formats. Efficient XML 
> Interchange (EXI) is a standardized, binary encoding of XML. Binary 
> JSON (BSON) and Compact Binary Object Representation (CBOR) are 
> JSON-compatible encodings. This work evaluates EXI compaction against 
> both encodings, and extends evaluations of EXI for datasets up to 4 
> gigabytes. Generally, a configuration of EXI exists that produces a 
> more compact encoding than BSON or CBOR. Tests show EXI compacts 
> structured, non-multimedia data in Microsoft Office files better than 
> the default format. The Navy needs to imme
> diately consider EXI for use in web, sensor, and office document 
> applications to improve throughput over constrained networks. To 
> maximize EXI benefits, future work needs to evaluate EXI’s parameters, 
> as well as tune XML schema documents, on a case-by-case basis prior to 
> EXI deployment. A suite of test examples and an evaluation framework 
> also need to be developed to support this process.
>
> Received Outstanding Thesis Award from NPS Information Sciences 
> Department.
>
> Keywords: Extensible Markup Language (XML), Efficient XML Interchange 
> (EXI), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Compact Binary Object 
> Representation (CBOR), Binary JSON (BSON), data serialization, data 
> interoperability.
>
> Links: catalog, slideset (.pdf), thesis.
> https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/45196
> https://wiki.nps.edu/download/attachments/547356759/HillEXIbriefingBigThingsSmall2015March29.pptx 
>
> https://wiki.nps.edu/download/attachments/547356759/HillEXIbriefingBigThingsSmall2015March29.pdf 
>
> https://wiki.nps.edu/download/attachments/547356759/15Mar_Hill_Bruce.pdf
> ================================================================================ 
>
>
> Acknowledgement: such work would not be possible without the steady 
> liaison efforts between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the 
> Web3D Consortium.  No single company or institution anywhere can 
> produce anything near the same results that such open partnerships can 
> achieve.  Membership has value.
>
>     Web3D Liaisons and Partnerships
>     http://www.web3d.org/about/liaisons
>
> Have fun with EXI, JSON and X3D!
>
> all the best, Don