[Last updated on: Mon Mar 4 10:39:00 1996]
The MG mailing list provides a forum for help, discussion and
announcements concerning the full-text retrieval system,
MG (Managing Gigabytes).

After you have subscribed, to send a message to the list please email:
mg-users@mds.rmit.edu.au

Below is a brief description of MG.

MG INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM
===============================

The MG system is a suite of programs for compressing and indexing text
and images. Most of the functionality implemented in the suite is as
described in the book ``Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing
Documents and Images'', I.H. Witten, A. Moffat, and T.C. Bell; Van
Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-442-01863-0; US $54.95; call
1 (800) 544-0550 to order.

These features include:

-- text compression using a Huffman-coded semi-static word-based scheme
-- two-level context-based compression of bi-level images
-- FELICS lossless compression of gray-scale images
-- combined lossy/lossless compression for textual images
-- indexing algorithms for large volumes of text in limited main memory
-- index compression
-- a retrieval system that processes Boolean and ranked queries
-- an X windows interface to the retrieval system

As one example, a collection of 2 Gb of text (1,700,000 documents) can
be indexed (on a SPARC 10 Model 512) in about four hours and compressed
in a further four hours to make a database that in total occupies less
than 800 Mb, or 40% of the original size. This includes a full index to
every word and number in the original text. Boolean queries such as
``managing AND gigabytes'' run in a few seconds, and ranked queries of
30--50 terms are evaluated in 10--30 seconds.

Details of these methods and further performance results appear in the
MG book.

Web pages describing MG can be accessed at http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/mg

The source code for MG can be ftp'ed from ftp://munnari.oz.au/pub/mg
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