Introduces this issue, which contains papers from the 1991 Data Compression Conference, and defines data compression. The two primary functions of data compression are described, i.e., storage and communications; types of data using compression technology are discussed; compression methods are explained; and current areas of research are…

Presents new methods for compressing bit matrices in large information retrieval systems which exploit possible correlations between rows of words and columns of documents. Three encoding methods are tested and compared--Shannon-Fano, arithmetic, and Huffman--and an appendix discusses binomial coefficients. (20 references) (LRW)

Discusses the problems of compressing a large textual database for storage on CD-ROM. A text-compression algorithm is presented, new algorithms for compression of indices are described, and the ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) database is used as an example. (14 references) (LRW)