Intelligent Information Retrieval Needs Smart Tools and Supporting Standards

Though Google is an eff ective and popular search engine for locating information on the World Wide Web, it has tended to have the eff ect of blinding people to the enormous and growing problem of accessing and sharing digital information, much of which is not even available on the Web. If we are to eff ectively tackle this problem we will need a range of information processing standards and tools. To illustrate this belief, brief mention is made of the new British Standards and emerging International Standards dealing with structured vocabularies and interoperability; and of some systems which are leading the way in their application and development