  Bit arrays, or bitmaps, are used to significantly speed up set operations in
several areas, such as data warehousing, information retrieval, and data
mining, to cite a few. However, bitmaps usually use a large storage space, thus
requiring compression. Nevertheless, there is a space-time tradeoff among
compression schemes. The Word Aligned Hybrid (WAH) bitmap compression trades
some space to allow for bitwise operations without first decompressing bitmaps.
WAH has been recognized as the most efficient scheme in terms of computation
time. In this paper we present CONCISE (Compressed 'n' Composable Integer Set),
a new scheme that enjoys significatively better performances than those of WAH.
In particular, when compared to WAH, our algorithm is able to reduce the
required memory up to 50%, by having similar or better performance in terms of
computation time. Further, we show that CONCISE can be efficiently used to
manipulate bitmaps representing sets of integral numbers in lieu of well-known
data structures such as arrays, lists, hashtables, and self-balancing binary
search trees. Extensive experiments over synthetic data show the effectiveness
of our approach.
