1. A method comprising organizing a byte stream of an information structure, said information structure having a schema and an in-memory representation, said schema having a schema tree representation with a plurality of schema nodes, said schema nodes including at least one leaf and at least one interior node, the step of organizing comprising the steps of: computing a layout from the schema tree representation by depth-first enumeration of leaf nodes of the schema; serializing the byte stream from the in-memory representation while grouping together all scalar items from the in-memory representation corresponding to each schema node; and accessing information from the byte stream by using the layout and offset calculations.