A Compression-Based Digital Library
Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science,
The University of Melbourne,
Parkville 3052, Australia.
Ian H. Witten
Department of Computer Science,
Waikato University,
New Zealand.
Status
DESIDOC Bulletin of Information Technology, 17(6):31-41, November 1997.
Abstract
The explosive growth in digital information places an ever-increasing burden on
the library mechanisms used to store and access it. A wide range of
technologies must be developed to manage this flood of data. For example, we
need ways of using storage effectively and economically, mechanisms for
indexing, and methods for fast content-based querying. In this article we
consider these three issues from an implementation point of view, showing how
appropriate data compression techniques can be harnessed to provide improved
solutions in all three areas. To set a context for the development, we discuss
the New Zealand Digital Library initiative, a Web-based tool that provides many
different services, the largest of which indexes in excess of 40,000 technical
documents drawn from sources around the world.