An environment for passively sharing information
James C. French · AIP conference proceedings · 1993
In 1963 the President’s Science Advisory Committee prepared a report [1], which declared that there was ‘‘a ‘crisis’ in scientific and technical information.’’ This crisis is due to the phenomenal growth in the scientific literature. Almost 30 year later on the eve of a new information explosion this crisis still persists and shows no signs of abating. The project described in this paper seeks to attack this problem by providing computer software to interconnect interested parties into an informal distributed information storage and retrieval system. After initially expressing areas of interest, users of this system will be able to participate rather passively while the distributed system constantly monitors its holdings for items of interest. User notifications will be automatically generated when interesting items appear in the information system.