Federated search of scientific literature

The Internet of the 21st Century will radically transform how we interact with knowledge. The rise of the World Wide Web and the information infrastructure have rapidly developed the technologies of collections for independent communities. In the future, online information will be dominated by small collections. The information infrastructure must similarly be radically different to support indexing of community collections and searching across such small collections. Users will consider themselves to be navigating in the Interspace, across logical spaces of semantic indexes, rather than in the Internet, across physical networks of computer servers. The digital libraries initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. The goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. This article details their efforts.