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From: sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <8700@spl1.UUCP>
Date: 1 Nov 88 04:25:04 GMT
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <5772@hoptoad.uucp> <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <5790@hoptoad.uucp> <557@metaps
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Reply-To: sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Organization: Metapsychology, Woodside, CA
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In article <5799@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>>There are fairly decent full-text retrieval and indexing programs
>>that would make a normal index obsolete.
>
>I was referring to an automatically generated inverted index, not an
>ordinary book index, which would be silly on a high-density optical
>medium.  It would still require human checking in any case, just as
>optical character recognition does, so the time would be noticeable.
>
>Because of the slow seeks and large amounts of data, it is neccessary
>to set up an index on an optical read-only medium at publication time;
>run-time search algorithms are way too slow.

I'm really out of my depth on this topic, but I believe one can
improve considerably on a mere inverted index.

Furthermore, All the indexing could be resident on the disk
(estimated about 1/3 or 1/2 the space of the text itself), and one
would not have to *create* the index at run time, merely *use* it, a
process which would take very little time (less than a second,
probably, for a fairly hefty search).
-- 
--------------------
Sarge Gerbode -- UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.  Palo Alto, CA 94301