Data caching issues in an information retrieval system

TLDR

Information retrieval systems are widely available, yet they rarely exploit users’ local computing resources such as processing and storage. This paper investigates using users’ local storage to cache data at the user’s site. To reduce the overhead of maintaining multiple copies, the authors introduce quasi‑copies that allow controlled divergence and outline deviation types and implementation strategies. Caching data locally improves query response time, though it requires overhead to maintain multiple copies.

Abstract

Currently, a variety of information retrieval systems are available to potential users.… While in many cases these systems are accessed from personal computers, typically no advantage is taken of the computing resources of those machines (such as local processing and storage). In this paper we explore the possibility of using the user's local storage capabilities to cache data at the user's site. This would improve the response time of user queries albeit at the cost of incurring the overhead required in maintaining multiple copies. In order to reduce this overhead it may be appropriate to allow copies to diverge in a controlled fashion.… Thus, we introduce the notion of quasi-copies , which embodies the ideas sketched above. We also define the types of deviations that seem useful, and discuss the available implementation strategies.—From the Authors' Abstract