Disk-based trie?

I'm trying to build a Trie but on a mobile phone whi开发者_开发问答ch has very limited memory capacity.

I figured that it is probably best that the whole structure be stored on disk, and only loaded as necessary since I can tolerate a few disk reads. But, after a few attempts, it seems like this is a very complicated thing to do.

What are some ways to store a Trie on disk (i.e. only partially loaded) and keep the fast lookup property?

Is this even a good idea to begin with?

The paper B-tries for disk-based string management answers your question.

It makes the observation:

To our knowledge, there has yet to be a proposal in literature for a trie-based data structure, such as the burst trie, the can reside efficiently on disk to support common string processing tasks.

I've only glanced at it briefly, but Shang's "Trie methods for text and spatial data on secondary storage" discusses paged trie representations, and might be a useful starting point.