COMPRESSING THE DIGITAL LIBRARY
Date
1994-03-01
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Abstract
The prospect of digital libraries presents the challenge of sto
ring vast amounts of information efficiently and in a way that facilitates
rapid search and retrieval. Storage space can be reduced by
appropriate compression techniques, and searching can be enabled by
constructing a full-text index. But these two requirements are in conflict:
the need for decompression increases access time, and the need for an
index increases space requirements. This paper resolves the conflict
by showing how (a) large bodies of text can be compressed and indexed into
less than half the space required by the original text alone, (b) full-text
queries (Boolean or ranked) can be answered in small fractions of a second,
and (c) documents can be decoded at the rate of approximately one
megabyte a second. Moreover, a document database can be compressed and
indexed at the rate of several hundred megabytes an hour.
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Computer Science