It will be possible to move beyond merely searching documents, so that you’re actually handling concepts, manipulating them. You will have repositories for groups and collections too small and informal to be handled by professional indexers, not like something for ASIS members or something for Electrical Engineers, but down to the fine-grain community level.
Predictor: Schatz, Bruce R.
Prediction, in context:Bruce Schatz, the principal investigator on the NSF/ARPA/NASA-funded Digital Libraries project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivers the keynote lecture at the American Society for Information Science’s annual meeting, in Chicago Oct. 11, 1995. He says: ”To give you some indication of what you should be thinking about that’s going to happen in your working lifetime – it will be possible to move beyond merely searching documents, so that you’re actually handling concepts, manipulating them. You will have repositories for groups and collections too small and informal to be handled by professional indexers, not like something for ASIS members or something for Electrical Engineers, but down to the fine-grain community level … The history of what the electronic medium of the Net is used for, all the way back to the videotex stage, shows that what people really want to do is to swap information and store particular things they care about, not access big centralized collections. So there will be a lot of capability for doing that swapping, and in order to do that you need an underlying infrastructure which will do a lot more than is possible to do now, well beyond full-text search. So you will see things like support for domain experts who don’t know anything about classification to enable them to do their own effective indexing. You will see support for being able to switch vocabulary across subject domains…”
Date of prediction: October 11, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Libraries/Databases
Name of publication: Keynote Plenary Lecture at American Society for Information Science Annual Meeting
Title, headline, chapter name: Information Analysis in the Net: The Interspace of the 21st Century
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.asis.org/asis-95/Schatz-Keynote/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Strickland, Amanda M.