Patent ID: 8190584

Claim:
An electronic device for providing electronic access to a dataset, the electronic device comprising: a data interface circuit; a transform circuit coupled to the data interface circuit, the transform circuit being constructed and arranged to: receive the dataset from the data interface circuit, the dataset representing meaningful information, electronically generate a first subset permutation based on a first subset of the dataset, electronically generate a second subset permutation based on a second subset of the dataset, each subset of the dataset including a series of data elements having a particular fixed bit-length, the first subset permutation including a rearrangement of the series of data elements of the first subset, and the second subset permutation including a rearrangement of the series of data elements of the second subset, form an electronic aggregation based on the first subset permutation and the second subset permutation, and electronically generate an aggregation permutation based on the electronic aggregation, the aggregation permutation including a rearrangement of portions of the electronic aggregation, and the meaningful information being recoverable from the aggregation permutation; and a data compression circuit coupled to the transform circuit, the data compression circuit being constructed and arranged to generate a compressed digital representation of the meaningful information based on the aggregation permutation; wherein electronically generating the first subset permutation based on the first subset of the dataset includes: parsing the first subset into a sequence of data elements which are M-bits in length, applying a transform involving lexicographic ordering to the sequence of data elements which are M-bits in length to form a first subset transform output, and obtaining a first subset entropy result which corresponds to the first subset transform output; parsing the first subset into a sequence of data elements which are N-bits in length, applying the transform involving lexicographic ordering to the sequence of data elements which are N-bits in length to form a second subset transform output, and obtaining a second subset entropy result which corresponds to the second subset transform output, M and N being different integer values; and identifying the first subset transform output as the first subset permutation rather than the second subset transform output based on the first and second subset entropy results.