Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images, Second Edition

Ian H.. Witten, Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell, Timothy C Bell, Timothy C.. Bell

Morgan Kaufmann, May 17, 1999 - Business & Economics - 519 pages

"This book is the Bible for anyone who needs to manage large data collections. It's required reading for our search gurus at Infoseek. The authors have done an outstanding job of incorporating and describing the most significant new research in information retrieval over the past five years into this second edition."
Steve Kirsch, Cofounder, Infoseek Corporation

"The new edition of Witten, Moffat, and Bell not only has newer and better text search algorithms but much material on image analysis and joint image/text processing. If you care about search engines, you need this book: it is the only one with full details of how they work. The book is both detailed and enjoyable; the authors have combined elegant writing with top-grade programming."
Michael Lesk, National Science Foundation

"The coverage of compression, file organizations, and indexing techniques for full text and document management systems is unsurpassed. Students, researchers, and practitioners will all benefit from reading this book."
Bruce Croft, Director, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts

In this fully updated second edition of the highly acclaimed Managing Gigabytes, authors Witten, 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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - juha - LibraryThing

A hard-core approach to information retrieval. I didn't appreaciate this book until recently, when I started to look for ways to reduce I/O. The use of compression in storing the text, integers, lexicon and inverted list is detailed beautifully.

User Review -

This is the only book there is that will actually teach you how to build an information retrieval system (aka search engine). It discusses all the algorithms and tradeoffs, and comes with free downloadable source code to experiment with. Some of the material is standard, but covered in more implementation detail here than anywhere else. Some of the material is novel: you won't find better coverage of compression unless you hand-assemble twenty research papers, and reverse-engineer them to figure out how they're implemented. But with "Managing Gigabytes", it's all here. (Although, after a particularly envigorating discussion of how to string together a bunch of techniques to compress their corpus and save a couple 100MB, I did a check and found you could buy 512MB of RAM for less than the cost of the book. Knowledge is Power, but sometimes a little cash is more powerful.) The only negative is that this book is not called "Managing Terabytes", as the first edition promised/threatened it might be. RAM and disk are cheap, but not that cheap, and for now terabytes (and sometimes petabytes) are managed only by NASA, Google, and a few others. I can't wait to see the third edition! 

Contents

• one Overview: 2
• two Text Compression: 21
• three Indexing: 103
• four Querying: 154
• five Index Construction: 223
• six Image Compression: 263
• seven Textual Images: 311
• eight Mixed Text and Images: 356
• Further reading: 388
• ten The Information Explosion: 431
• A Guide to the mg System: 451
• B Guide to the NZDL: 469
• References: 485
• Index: 507
• About the Authors: 519

About the author

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. He has written several books, the latest being Managing Gigabytes (1999) and Data Mining (2000), both from Morgan Kaufmann.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images, Second Edition; Morgan Kaufmann Series in Mult; Multimedia Information and Systems Series; The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Multimedia Information and Systems
• Authors: Ian H.. Witten, Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell, Timothy C Bell, Timothy C.. Bell
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999
• ISBN: 1558605703, 9781558605701
• Length: 519 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / General; Computers / Databases / General; Computers / Software Development & Engineering / General; Computers / System Administration / Storage & Retrieval