Thwab Project

A free encyclopedia system

"in which there are valuable Books." V98:3

Objectives

Thwab 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.

How to get Thwab

Download the viewer source "thwab-lib.tar.bz2" from download page then download every book or content separately from data page (every book is 3 files), you may also browse books on-line. You also can create Thwab files your self

Technical Information

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 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