news@littlei.UUCP (11/12/88)
In article <1804@garth.UUCP> fenwick@garth.UUCP (Stephen Fenwick) writes: |In article <4105@encore.UUCP> bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein) writes: |>The point of putting books on-line is [...] to make them accessible to new |>generations of tools, [...] | |The only problem with this is keeping everything on file in a manner that |allows users to find what they need. This is non-trivial, as the information |content of a work may not be limited by the author's conception of the its |content. Watch the PBS series "Connections" to see what I mean. Machines |are currently very good a fast data retrieval, but decidedly bad at making |inferences about the data that they store. With a general purpose hypertext system, humans would make the machine record the connections as they were discovered. See alt.hypertext. From what I've read here in comp.sys.next, the "Digital Librarian" is not a general purpose hypertext system. I'm not even sure it's hypertext. Scott Peterson -- OMSO Software Engineering -- Intel, Hillsboro OR uunet!littlei\ tektronix!reed!foobar >!sdp!sdp -- or -- sdp@sdp.hf.intel.com psu-cs!foobar/