Abstract
Memex (Bush, 1945) became an influential ideal and was hailed as the inspiration for hypertext and other new ways for information retrieval and organization. To deal with the explosion of scientific information, Bush’s proposal for Memex focused on the problems of “locating relevant information in the published record and recording how that information was intellectually connected” (Bush, 1945). The expansion of information will be more and more serious as the Internet grows and most future computers are network-based. Thus, researchers have to consider the problems of “locating relevant published records in the published machines and recording how those records are intellectually connected.”
Key Terms in this Chapter
Memex: The “Memex” is a theoretical analogue computer described by Vannevar Bush.
Information Retrieval: Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for information in documents for text, sound, images or data.
Knowledge-Based: Knowledge-based systems are systems based on the techniques of artificial intelligence. The core components are the knowledge base and the inference engines.
World Wide Web: The World Wide Web (“WWW”, or simply “Web”) is an information space in which resources are identified by global identifiers called uniform resource identifiers (URI).
Digital Library: A digital library is a collection of books and reference materials stored in digital format.
Search Engine: A search engine is a program designed to help find information stored on computer systems such as the World Wide Web or personal computers.
Internet: The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols.