Downloading the entire intranet to a phone?

That sounds like a crazy idea doesn't it: having the entire intranet available on your mobile device, even if you're not online, or in a mobile/3G/Wi-Fi reception area (like a plane at 35,000 feet).

While the mechanics are undoubtedly different, and you very likely wouldn't need the entire intranet on your phone, this O-Reilly interview concerns a developer who has ported all of Wikipedia to the iPhone. It provides food for thought if you're charged with providing detailed knowledge bases and information resources to mobile operatives and employees:

Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encylopedia iPhone application does.

In making Wikipedia fit on the 8GB phone, and robust enough to use, Collison stripped out anything and everything that would derail the application from its ambition:

"It's around 12 or 13 gigabytes uncompressed. The very first thing we do is it comes in this very verbose XML format. We have our own custom format that just includes the bare minimum amount of metadata. And then compacts it in this fairly space efficient binary way. We manage to strip out 20 or 30 percent of the content just by doing that.

Then we apply bzip compression... we also remove some of the content from the applications, the kind of stuff that's not particularly useful on the phone. We strip out the links, for example, to the article in other languages because those links don't work in an offline application. We don't have the other languages. We add links to pictures because we're not storing the pictures. We strip out references because I'm assuming you're not too interested in analyzing the minutia of the references when you're using the phone, and that kind of stuff. And so that, again, saved us another 20 to 30 percent or so.

And really, that's it. I mean what ends up being transferred to the phone is just this huge two gigabyte bzip2 encoded text file that we then index in various ways to allow it to selectively decompress various chunks when a user wants to load an article."

This is clever, and there's definitely some potential uses for such a process in the corporate environment - that's if intranets on mobile devices ever really take off.

Encylopedia - Wikipedia on the iPhone $12.99 by Steam Heavy Industries (iTunes link)

[O'Reilly Radar]