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