HyperText and Information Retrieval
There was a panel on this topic at
ECHT90. Some (IR) peopele maintained
that nothing in HT was substantially
new, and some (HT) people maintained
that HT was significantly different.
This was, in some ways, a fairly
pointless discussion. There seemed
to be a consensus that both conventional
IR techniques (such as full text
searches) and hypertext-style linking
from sensitive areas would be needed,
and many products in fact combine
both flavours. The HT people were
in general better at making sexy
front end systems, while they had
nothing much to add to the IR community's
back-end algorithms.
However, it is obvious that whatever
the underlying indexing and link
support, one must make the user interface
as consistent as possible. A nice
example of this is the generic linking
concept of Microcosm, picked up also
by the Perseus project .
The WWW project alows many indexes
to exist within a hypertext web.
It represents the results of an index
search as hypertext, so using the
a single model