In a world first, an Australia based researcher has managed to  compress  the whole of Wikipedia  -- including  Wiktionary, Wikitravel, Wikibooks and other Wiki data bases -- so that it can be stored on an iPhone and updated  regularly.

 

The work of Raymond Wong of  National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA), it's called Tiniwiki  and also works for non Wikipedia content as well. allowing users to carry  large  sets of information like reference and emergency materials on their hand phones.  The advantage of squeezing large content like Wiki on to the phone is that it  can be accessed without having to be online. On the other hand,  it is regularly updated and allows full content search.  The technology is XML compression -- Wikipedia in its original form is 60 GB and growing, while the tiniwiki application is just 6 GB.

 

Available at  the iTunes App store for about  $ 6 for a year's subscription of updates, tiniwiki(www.tiniwiki.com )  is now in beta for other platforms like java phones on Windows mobile devices. It was on show last week at  the CommunicAsia event in Singapore.

 

(June 22 2009)