We study data structures in the presence of adversarial noise. We want to
encode a given object in a succinct data structure that enables us to
efficiently answer specific queries about the object, even if the data
structure has been corrupted by a constant fraction of errors. This new model
is the common generalization of (static) data structures and locally decodable
error-correcting codes. The main issue is the tradeoff between the space used
by the data structure and the time (number of probes) needed to answer a query
about the encoded object. We prove a number of upper and lower bounds on
various natural error-correcting data structure problems. In particular, we
show that the optimal length of error-correcting data structures for the
Membership problem (where we want to store subsets of size s from a universe of
size n) is closely related to the optimal length of locally decodable codes for
s-bit strings.Comment: 15 pages LaTeX; an abridged version will appear in the Proceedings of
the STACS 2009 conferenc