Future Information Retrieval Systems

An IBM report, back in 2000, discussed the possibilities of holographic storage of data. The report is quite technical, and I certainly did not read the entire thing. However, I was struck by some information on something called "Associative Retrieval," particularly how it might effect the future of indexing. You can see one extract below or the full report by following the link. Searching within the report using Ctrl-F for associative retrieval will pull up more information.

Searching the terms will pull up more information, including a company called InPhase Technologies which demonstrated a prototype in 2005 and is promising terabyte storage levels. It seems to me the implications of associative retrieval might directly impact the future of indexing.

Holographic Data Storage (IBM Technical Report)

"A rather unique feature of holographic data storage is associative retrieval: Imprinting a partial or search data pattern on the object beam and illuminating the stored holograms reconstructs all of the reference beams that were used to store data. The intensity that is diffracted by each of the stored interference gratings into the corresponding reconstructed reference beam is proportional to the similarity between the search pattern and the content of that particular data page. By determining, for example, which reference beam has the highest intensity and then reading the corresponding data page with this reference beam, the closest match to the search pattern can be found without initially knowing its address."