State-of-the-art approaches to retrieving information employ two generic techniques: (1) matching words in the query against the database index (key-word searching) and (2) traversing the database with the aid of hypertext or hypermedia links.

Key-word searches can be made either more general or more narrow in scope by means of logical operators (e.g., disjunction and conjunction). Because of the semantic ambiguities involved in free-text indexing, however, the precision of the key-word retrieval technique—that is, the percentage of relevant documents correctly retrieved from a collection—is far from ideal, and various modifications have been introduced to improve it. In one such enhancement, the search output is sorted by degree of relevance, based on a statistical match between the key words in the query and in the document; in another, the program automatically generates a new query using one or more documents considered relevant by the user. Key-word searching has been the dominant approach to text retrieval since the early 1960s; hypertext has so far been largely confined to personal or corporate information-retrieval applications.

The exponential growth of the use of computer networks in the 1990s presages significant changes in systems and techniques of information retrieval. In a wide-area information service, a number of which began operating at the beginning of the 1990s on the Internet computer network, a user’s personal computer or terminal (called a client) can search simultaneously a number of databases maintained on heterogeneous computers (called servers). The latter are located at different geographic sites, and their databases contain different data types and often use incompatible data formats. The simultaneous, distributed search is possible because clients and servers agree on a standard document addressing scheme and adopt a common communications protocol that accommodates all the data types and formats used by the servers. Communication with other wide-area services using different protocols is accomplished by routing through so-called gateways capable of protocol translation. The architecture of a typical networked information system is illustrated in Figure 5. Several representative clients are shown: a “dumb” terminal (i.e., one with no internal processor), a personal computer (PC), a Macintosh (Mac), and a NeXT machine. They have access to data on the servers sharing a common protocol as well as to data provided by services that require protocol conversion via the gateways. Network news is such a wide-area service, containing hundreds of news groups on a variety of subjects, by which users can read and post messages.

Evolving information-retrieval techniques, exemplified by an experimental interface to the NASA space shuttle reference manual, combine natural language, hyperlinks, and key-word searching. Other techniques, seeking higher levels of retrieval precision and effectiveness, are studied by researchers involved with artificial intelligence and neural networks. The next major milestone may be a computer program that traverses the seamless information universe of wide-area electronic networks and continuously filters its contents through profiles of organizational and personal interest: the information robot of the 21st century.

Video

Possibly the most widely used video display device, at least in the industrialized world, is the television set. Designed primarily for video and sound, its image resolution is inadequate for alphanumeric data except in relatively small amounts. Use of the television set in text-oriented information systems has been limited to menu-oriented applications such as videotex, in which information is selected from hierarchically arranged menus (with the aid of a numeric keyboard attachment) and displayed in fixed frames. The television, computer, and communications technologies are, however, converging in a high-resolution digital television set capable of receiving alphanumeric, video, and audio signals.

The computer video terminal is today’s ubiquitous interface that transforms computer-stored data into analog form for human viewing. The two basic apparatuses used are the cathode-ray tube (CRT) and the more recent flat-panel display. In CRT displays an electron gun emits beams of electrons on a phosphorus-coated surface; the beams are deflected, forming visible patterns representative of data. Flat-panel displays use one of four different media for visual representation of data: liquid crystal, light-emitting diodes, plasma panels, and electroluminescence. Advanced video display systems enable the user to scroll, page, zoom (change the scale of the details of the display image for enhancement), divide the screen into multiple colours and windows (viewing areas), and in some cases even activate commands by touching the screen instead of using the keyboard. The information capacity of the terminal screen depends on its resolution, which ranges from low (character-addressable) to high (bit-addressable). High resolution is indispensable for the display of graphic and video data in state-of-the-art workstations, such as those used in engineering or information systems design.

Print

Modern society continues to be dominated by printed information. The convenience and portability of print on paper make it difficult to imagine the paperless world that some have predicted. The generation of paper print has changed considerably, however. Although manual typesetting is still practiced for artwork, in special situations, and in some developing countries, electronic means of composing pages for subsequent reproduction by photoduplication and other methods has become commonplace.

Since the 1960s, volume publishing has become an automated process using large computers and high-speed printers to transfer digitally stored data on paper. The appearance of microcomputer-based publishing systems has proved to be another significant advance. Economical enough to allow even small organizations to become in-house publishers, these so-called desktop publishing systems are able to format text and graphics interactively on a high-resolution video screen with the aid of page-description command languages. Once a page has been formatted, the entire image is transferred to an electronic printing or photocomposition device.

Voice

In synthetic speech generation, digitally prestored sound elements are converted to analog sound signals and combined to form words and sentences. Digital-to-analog converters are available as inexpensive boards for microcomputers or as software for larger machines. Human speech is the most effective natural form of communication, and so applications of this technology are becoming increasingly popular in situations where there are numerous requests for specific information (e.g., time, travel, and entertainment), where there is a need for repetitive instruction, in electronic voice mail (the counterpart of electronic text mail), and in toys.