ASN.1 in itself is a schema syntax. That schema can be serialized into various related forms, but all of them are more or less a transport formats that cannot b

ASN.1 in itself is a schema syntax. That schema can be serialized into various related forms, but all of them are more or less a transport formats that cannot be reasonably used for random access. There are some more or less general hierarchical formats with support for random access, but most of them are tightly related with particular technology stack (ie. MS's COM Compound Document) or with particular usage area (there is HDF5 for scientific data and many multimedia containers are in fact a hierarchical databases, with both the various IFF variants and EBML being explicitly designed as reusable formats for arbitrary data). And then there are formats that implicitly contain some kind of hierarchical container mechanism (PDF, TIFF, DICOM, FPS game map files…).