The concept of links between documents begin to be discussed as a paradigm for organizing textual material and knowledge.
The first full-text searching of documents by computer is demonstrated.
The first version of the MeSH medical lexicon goes into use.
Roger Tomlinson initiates the Canada Geographic Information System, creating the first GIS system.
ASCII Code defines a standard bit representation for every character in English.
Eugene Garfield publishes the first edition of the Science Citation Index, which indexes scientific literature through references in papers.
Dun & Bradstreet begins to assign a unique number to every company.
The National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) publishes tables and properties of many higher mathematical functions
US President Lyndon Johnson signs the act into law, mandating public access to government records.
British SBN codes are introduced, later generalized to ISBN in 1970.
The DIALOG online information retrieval system becomes accessible from remote locations.
Henriette Avram creates the MAchine-Readable Cataloging system at the Library of Congress, defining metatagging standards for books.
Relational databases and query languages allow huge amounts of data to be stored in a way that makes certain common kinds of queries efficient enough to be done as a routine part of business.
With the emergence of progressively cheaper computers, it becomes possible to do computations immediately, integrating them as part of the everyday process of working with knowledge.
Largely as an offshoot of AI, expert systems are an attempt to capture the knowledge of human experts in specialized domains, using logic-based inferential systems.
Karen Spärck Jones, a computer scientist known for her work on information retrieval and natural language processing, is responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency, which underlies most modern search engines.
Lexis provides full-text records of US court opinions in an online retrieval system.
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes give a mathematical method for valuing stock options.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) implements an eight-digit coded system to serve as a bibliographic tool for students, librarians and researchers to uniquely identify articles, specific text volumes and other serialized publications.
With precursors in the 1940s, neural networks emerge in the 1980s as a concept for storing and manipulating various types of knowledge using connections reminiscent of nerve cells.
Walter Goad at Los Alamos founds GenBank to collect all genome sequences being found.
The Domain Name System for hierarchical Internet addresses is created; in 1984, .com and other top-level domains (TLDs) are named.
Cyc is a long-running project to encode common sense facts in a computable form.
Mathematica is created to provide a uniform system for all forms of algorithmic computation by defining a symbolic language to represent arbitrary constructs and then assembling a huge web of consistent algorithms to operate on them.
The web grows to provide billions of pages of freely available information from all corners of civilization.
Gopher provides a menu-based system for finding material on computers connected to the internet.
The Unicode standard assigns a numerical code to every glyph in every human language.
Tim Berners-Lee creates the Virtual Library, the first systematic catalog of the web.
Quick Response (QR) scannable barcodes are created in Japan, encoding information for computer eyes to read.
Brewster Kahle founds the Internet Archive to begin systematically capturing and storing the state of the web.
Google and other search engines provide highly efficient capabilities to do textual searches across the whole content of the web.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the inter-networking of physical devices embedded with connectivity and software that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey spends nearly a decade automatically mapping every visible object in the astronomical universe.
The fingerprint of any scientific document, the Digital Object Identifier has increased the visibility of and access to scientific publications while ensuring the intellectual property of each piece of work remains intact.
Social networking and other collective websites define a mechanism for collectively assembling information by and about people.
Volunteer contributors assemble millions of pages of encyclopedia material, providing textual descriptions of practically all areas of human knowledge.
Stephen Wolfram explores the universe of possible simple programs and shows that knowledge about many natural and artificial processes could be represented in terms of surprisingly simple programs.
The Human Genome Project is declared complete in finding a reference DNA sequence for every human.
Facebook begins to capture social relations between people on a large scale.
Steve Coast initiates a project to create a crowdsourced street-level map of the world.
Satoshi Nakamoto invents blockchain as the public transaction ledger for Bitcoin.
Consumer electronics companies like Fitbit begin releasing activity trackers that track movement, steps and heart rate through signal processing, uploading data via the internet to a cloud service to be processed and analyzed.
Wolfram|Alpha is launched as a website that computes answers to natural-language queries based on a large collection of algorithms and curated data.
Digital assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa that perform digital speech recognition to automate a variety of consumer or industrial applications become popular.
The Wolfram Data Repository makes public data computable and accessible while also keeping it securely stored.