INSTRUCT: Space-Efficient Structure for Indexing and Complete Query Management of String Databases

The tremendous expanse of search engines, dictionary and thesaurus storage, and other text mining applications, combined with the popularity of readily available scanning devices and optical character recognition tools, has necessitated efficient storage, retrieval and management of massive text databases for various modern applications. For such applications, we propose a novel data structure, INSTRUCT, for efficient storage and management of sequence databases. Our structure uses bit vectors for reusing the storage space for common triplets, and hence, has a very low memory requirement. INSTRUCT efficiently handles prefix and suffix search queries in addition to the exact string search operation by iteratively checking the presence of triplets. We also propose an extension of the structure to handle substring search efficiently, albeit with an increase in the space requirements. This extension is important in the context of trie-based solutions which are unable to handle such queries efficiently. We perform several experiments portraying that INSTRUCT outperforms the existing structures by nearly a factor of two in terms of space requirements, while the query times are better. The ability to handle insertion and deletion of strings in addition to supporting all kinds of queries including exact search, prefix/suffix search and substring search makes INSTRUCT a complete data structure.