Data Compression

Data Compression also called data compaction. In computer science, a term applied to various means of compacting information for more efficient transmission or storage, used in such areas as data communication, database management systems, facsimile transmission, and CD-ROM publishing. One common compression technique, called key-word encoding, replaces each frequently occurring word�such as the or here�with a 2-byte token, thus saving one or more bytes of storage for every instance of that word in a text file.

Data compression is the compaction of data in order to make data storage and transmission more efficient. Data compression isused frequently on data storage in order to maximise storage capacity. CD-ROM publishers will compress data onto a CD to reduce production costs using one rather than two CDs. This is maximising on the data storage capacity of the CDs.

In order to access this data properly with unlimited access data compressed will have to be decompressed to into it's original format and size. But a user can have limited access to compressed data. An example of this would be the viewing and editing of data compressed in a pkzip archive

There are many data compression techniques, some like the one mentioned earlier looks for repeated data for referencing.

Other techniques will simply continually compress data or change the data format re-encode.

Data compression has obviously improved data compression, it has simply meant that more data can be sent in the time it would take to send a smaller amount of data, hence 'more efficient'.

Data compression is used in e-mail, voice telecommunication, faxing, FTPing backing up and sound recording.

Example Sites

- Data Compression Software

- ISP

- Telecommunications Company