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Data Package Standard

Compression of Resources

It can be argued that applying compression to data resources can make data package publishing more cost-effective and sustainable. Compressing data resources gives publishers the benefit of reduced storage and bandwidth costs and gives consumers the benefit of shorter download times.

Implementations

Specification

All compressed resources MUST have a path that allows the compression property to be inferred. If the compression can’t be inferred from the path property (e.g. a custom file extension is used) then the compression property MUST be used to specify the compression.

Supported compression types:

  • gz
  • zip

Example of a compressed resource with implied compression:

{
  "name": "data-resource-compression-example",
  "path": "http://example.com/large-data-file.csv.gz",
  "title": "Large Data File",
  "description": "This large data file benefits from compression.",
  "format": "csv",
  "mediatype": "text/csv",
  "encoding": "utf-8",
  "bytes": 1073741824
}

Example of a compressed resource with the compression property:

{
  "name": "data-resource-compression-example",
  "path": "http://example.com/large-data-file.csv.gz",
  "title": "Large Data File",
  "description": "This large data file benefits from compression.",
  "format": "csv",
  "compression" : "gz",
  "mediatype": "text/csv",
  "encoding": "utf-8",
  "bytes": 1073741824
}

:::tip NOTE Resource properties e.g. bytes, hash etc apply to the compressed object — not to the original uncompressed object. :::