Federated search of scientific literature

The Internet of the 21st century will radically transform how we interact w ith knowledge. The rise of the World Wide Web and the information infrastru cture have rapidly developed the technologies of collections for independen t communities. In the future, online information will be dominated by small collections. The information infrastructure must similarly be radically different to sup port indexing of community collections and searching across such small coll ections. Users will consider themselves to be navigating in the Interspase, across logical spaces of semantic indexes, rather than in the Internet, ac ross physical networks of computer servers. The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinoi s at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSE DARPA. and NASA from 1994 through 1998. The goal: develop widely usable Web technolog y to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. This article d etails their efforts.