Managing Gigabytes

In this fully updated second edition of the highly acclaimed Managing Gigabytes, authors Written, Moffat, and Bell continue to provide unparalleled coverage of state-of-the-art techniques for compressing and indexing data. Whatever your field, if you work with large quantities of information, this book is essential reading - an authoritative theoretical resource and a practical guide to meeting the toughest storage and access challenges. It covers the latest developments in compression and indexing and their application on the Web and in digital libraries. It also details dozens of powerful techniques supported by mg, the authors' own system for compressing, storing, and retrieving text, images, and textual images. Mg's source code is freely available on the Web. It provides up-to-date coverage of new text compression algorithms such as block sorting, approximate arithmetic coding, and fat Huffman coding. It includes new sections on content-based index compression and distributed querying, with 2 new data structures for fast indexing. It provides new coverage of image coding, including descriptions of de facto standards in use on the Web (GIF and PNG), information on CALIC, the new proposed JPEG Lossless standard, and JBIG2. It includes new information on the Internet and WWW, digital libraries, web search engines, and agent-based retrieval. It is accompanied by a public domain system called MG which is a fully worked-out operational example of the advanced techniques developed and explained in the book. It includes a new appendix on an existing digital library system that uses the MG software.