Another format that might be worth looking at in the bioinformatics world is hdf5. It's sort of a generic file format, often used for storing multiple related l

Another format that might be worth looking at in the bioinformatics world is hdf5. It's sort of a generic file format, often used for storing multiple related large tables. It has some built-in compression (gzip IIRC) but supports plugins. There may be an opportunity to integrate the self-describing nature of the hdf5 format with the self-describing decompression routines of openZL.