The Telephone Directory Enquiry System of Hong Kong

This paper is concerned with the design and performance of the telephone directory enquiry system newly adopted in Hong Kong. This system maintains three million telephone records and supports over forty thousand enquiries per hour at the peak. In the Hong Kong society the uses of English and Chinese (in particular, Cantonese) has been blending in a thrust of exciting language culture, giving rise to a variety of telephone enquires that traditional B-tree or hashing based telephone directory enquiry systems fail to handle. The efficiency and flexibility achieved by the new system stem from hosting all indexing data structuresin the main memory; these data structures occupy about half giga-bytes and would have been considered too expensive to be placed in the main memory in the past.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: APSEC
• Authors: K. P. Chow, Tak Wah Tak Wah, Ka Hing Lee
• Keywords: APSEC 1996, Hong Kong, Software Engineering, Telephone Directory Enquiry, Telephone Records