Semantic caching is a technique that integrates support for associative access into an architecture based on data-shipping. It can be very attractive for use in distributed systems due to the reduced network traffic and the improved response time. This interesting topic came to us from the ACL Digital Library in their paper, “Using Semantic Caching to Manage Location Dependent Data in Mobile Computing.”

It is particularly efficient for a mobile computing environment, where the bandwidth of wireless links is a major performance bottleneck.

Choosing an effective caching scheme requires some research. Obviously, location plays an important role in location-dependent queries. In addition, the semantic locality among list dynamic dependency (LDD) queries is usually highly related with the moving path of the mobile user.

Caching is important for any system attempting to achieve high performance. Semantic caching is an approach trying to benefit from certain semantic knowledge of the data to be processed.

Melody K. Smith

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