[Esip-preserve] Review Article on the "Memex" in the new CACM

[Bruce Barkstrom]

The new Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery
[Feb. 2011] has an interesting article entitled "Still Building the Memex"
[DOI:10.1145/1897816.1897840] [CACM, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 80-88,
just in case I misread the small type of the DOI citation].  The "Memex"
was a hypothetical machine that Vannevar Bush (an advisor to President
Truman) suggested in an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945.  This
machine would store information and retrieve it quickly.  The concept
led to the creation of hyperlinks, whose connection with the WWW is
pretty nicely described in the CACM paper.

However, the paper doesn't just describe the emergence of hypertext,
it also describes various data structures for organizing the data, including
graphs, trees, and other structures.  The most interesting of these is
the "Zig-Zag" approach that Ted Nelson appears to have invented.  If
you haven't seen this, try finding the software on the WWW.  I find it
mind-boggling.

When we get into some of the issues connected with
metadata presentation, we might want to try to categorize the approaches
we could adopt based on this paper.

Bruce B.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.lists.esipfed.org/pipermail/esip-preserve/attachments/20110216/b4d10e47/attachment.html>