Data Compression

Data Compression, also called data compaction. In computer science, a term applied to various means of compacting information for more efficient transmission or storage, used in such areas as data communication, database management systems, facsimile transmission, and CD-ROM publishing. One common compression technique, called key-word encoding, replaces each frequently occurring word—such as the or here—with a 2-byte token, thus saving one or more bytes of storage for every instance of that word in a text file. See also Telecommunications.