Tying up the loose ends in fully LZW-compressed pattern matching by Pawel Gawrychowski.
Abstract:
We consider a natural generalization of the classical pattern matching problem: given compressed representations of a pattern p[1..M] and a text t[1..N] of sizes m and n, respectively, does p occur in t? We develop an optimal linear time solution for the case when both p and t are compressed using the LZW method. This improves the previously known O((n+m)log(n+m)) time solution of Gasieniec and Rytter, and essentially closes the line of research devoted to studying LZW-compressed exact pattern matching.
I don’t know of any topic maps that are yet of the size that they and queries against them need to take advantage of compressed queries against compress data but this paper outlines “an optimal linear time solution … for fully LZW-compressed pattern matching.” (page 2)
I suspect it may be more relevant to data mining prior to the construction of a topic map. But in either case, when needed it will be a welcome solution.