What is Thwab
What is Thwab-lib
Thwab Library is an Electronic Encyclopedia System
that is international, portable, simple,
extensible (as one could add more books and articles),
fast, caching, smart and maybe at some level intelligent!
It is supposed to be independent on the media holding
contents, for example contents could be in several CDs,
installed on local fixed disk, or located somewhere
on the web all using convenient way for each.
Unlike Windows-Based proprietary Encyclopedia Systems
this library does not used personal (aka. silly ) database
back-ends (eg. MS-Access) for millions of reasons,
and unlike many free (open-source) systems
it does not use XML as it's almost impossible
to be randomly accessed without holding the entire file
on RAM which on our case could be very large.
Thwab-Lib use very efficient compression in terms of
both speed and size, it use a standard hierarchy
of plain text files archived with standard TAR file format
and compressed with BZip2 library (a very strong compression)
that is somehow optimized for fast random access
through few-bytes index file and few compression-degrading
calls to BZip2 library.
Using this simple standard file format simplify
creating new Thwab files, as no special tools
are needed, just a file manager and a text editor.
Also it allow researchers who want to do special
unconventional analysis or filtering on the
material, they could simply extract the content
of this archive using standard unmodified GNU TAR!
There are collections of scripts (perl scripts)
that are used to manipulate Thwab file tree,
for creating a Thwab file or analyzing it.
Thwab-Lib is still under heavy development
not all planed features are implemented yet,
and not all specification are yet planed,
but it's usable.
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