Fujitsu Promotes W3C's "Efficient XML Interchange Format 1.0"

Tokyo and Kawasaki, Japan and Sunnyvale, U.S., March 11, 2011

Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., and Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc. today announced that Fujitsu, as a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)⁽¹⁾ - an international community to develop the Web standards - has contributed to developing the W3C Recommendation "Efficient XML⁽²⁾ Interchange Format 1.0 (EXI)," which was published by the W3C recently. Fujitsu has been participating in the EXI Working Group, which developed this technical specification, since the inception of the working group. Fujitsu plans to leverage the unique expertise gained in the course of developing this standard, through incorporation in Fujitsu products to enable customers to use EXI technology more easily and effectively.

Background

The W3C published the XML specification in 1998, and since then it has come into widespread use as a data exchange format over the Internet, because of its capability and flexibility to represent data. XML documents that represent data are human-legible and verbose - these features tend to make XML documents much larger in volume than their original forms. There is also a burden of further processing necessitated, parsing an XML document, to extract desired data from it. For these reasons, applications and services that exchange XML documents suffer from relatively poor efficiency, which is considered one of the drawbacks of XML.

About EXI

In 2006, the W3C established the Efficient XML Interchange Working Group (EXI WG), bringing together businesses and organizations that shared this awareness of the shortcomings in XML document exchange. The EXI WG conducted a survey of the various situations and applications in which data exchange using XML were desired, and studied a best solution in which XML-based data exchange could be made sufficiently efficient and reasonable under any conditions. The effort of the group is now available as the W3C Recommendation⁽³⁾, "Efficient XML Interchange Format 1.0." Fujitsu has been participating in the EXI WG as a charter member and serving as a co-chair of the group since 2008, contributing to deliver this technology standard with technical expertise and in managerial capacity.

Propagation through Fujitsu's Business

As EXI is now available as a standard, Fujitsu plans to incorporate EXI technology into products that will help customers use the technology easily and effectively. Fujitsu plans to continue its activities in the EXI WG, to research and develop ways in which EXI can make data exchange using XML sufficiently efficient and reasonable for use in areas where it had previously been intractable.

Benefits to Customers

It has been observed that many proprietary data exchange formats were invented to cope with inefficiencies of XML document exchange, which resulted in a babel of formats, each created for a different purpose and domain. This resulted in making communications difficult across systems in different domains. EXI technology makes it possible for any systems in any domains to exchange XML documents at reasonable overhead. With EXI as a W3C Recommendation, interoperability with third-party products and services can be improved and secured.