Standardizing Information and Communication Systems

In the past decades, ECMA has published numerous ECMA Standards for magnetic tapes, magnetic tape cassettes and cartridges, as well as for optical disk cartridges. Those media developed recently have a very high physical recording density. In order to make optimal use of the resulting data capacity, lossless compression algorithms have been designed that allow a reduction of the number of bits required for the representation of user data. These compression algorithms are registered by ECMA, the International Registration Authority established by ISO/IEC. The registration consists in allocating to each registered algorithm a numerical identifier that will be recorded on the medium and, thus, indicate which compression algorithm(s) has been used. This ECMA Standard is the fourth ECMA Standard for compression algorithms. The three previous standards are: ECMA-15