Timeline of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge

Timeline of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge: 1960 - 2010


1960: Hypertext

Imagining connectivity in the world's knowledge

The concept of links between documents begin to be discussed as a paradigm for organizing textual material and knowledge.

1963: ZIP Codes

ZIP (Zoning Improvement Plan) codes are introduced by the US Post Office.

1960: Full-Text Search

Finding text without an index

The first full-text searching of documents by computer is demonstrated.

1964: Abramowitz and Stegun

Collecting mathematical functions

The National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) publishes tables and properties of many higher mathematical functions

1960: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Organizing the world's medical knowledge

The first version of the MeSH medical lexicon goes into use.

1966: Freedom of Information Act

US President Lyndon Johnson signs the act into law, mandating public access to government records.

1962: Roger Tomlinson

Computerizing geographic information

Roger Tomlinson initiates the Canada Geographic Information System, creating the first GIS system.

1966: SBN Codes

A number for every book

British SBN codes are introduced, later generalized to ISBN in 1970.

1963: ASCII Code

A standard number for every letter

ASCII Code defines a standard bit representation for every character in English.

1967: DIALOG

Retrieving information from anywhere

The DIALOG online information retrieval system becomes accessible from remote locations.

1963: Science Citation Index

Mapping science by citations

Eugene Garfield publishes the first edition of the Science Citation Index, which indexes scientific literature through references in papers.

1968: MARC

Henriette Avram creates the MAchine-Readable Cataloging system at the Library of Congress, defining metatagging standards for books.

1963: Data Universal Numbering System (D-U-N-S)

A number for every business

Dun & Bradstreet begins to assign a unique number to every company.


1970s: Relational Databases

Making relations between data computable

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.

1973: Lexis

Legal information goes online

Lexis provides full-text records of US court opinions in an online retrieval system.

1970—1980s: Interactive Computing

Getting immediate results from computers

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.

1973: Neil Sloane

Neil Sloane begins to catalog "interesting" sequences of integers.

1970—1980s: Expert Systems

Capturing expert knowledge as inference rules

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.

1974: UPC Codes

Every product gets a number

The UPC standard for barcodes is launched.

1973: Black-Scholes Formula

Bring mathematics to financial derivatives

Fischer Black and Myron Scholes give a mathematical method for valuing stock options.


1980s: Neural Networks

Handling knowledge by emulating the brain

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.

1984: Cyc

Creating a computable database of common sense

Cyc is a long-running project to encode common sense facts in a computable form.

1982: GenBank

Collecting the codes of life

Walter Goad at Los Alamos founds GenBank to collect all genome sequences being found.

1988: Mathematica

Language for algorithmic computation

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.

1983: DNS

The Domain Name System for hierarchical Internet addresses is created; in 1984, .com and other top-level domains (TLDs) are named.

1989: The Web

Collecting the world's information

The web grows to provide billions of pages of freely available information from all corners of civilization.


1990: IMDb

Indexing movies

The Internet Movie Database is launched.

1994: Yahoo!

Jerry Yang and David Filo create a hierarchical directory of the web.

1991: Gopher

Burrowing around the internet

Gopher provides a menu-based system for finding material on computers connected to the internet.

1995: CDDB

Indexing music

Ti Kan indexes CDs with CDDB, which becomes Gracenote.

1991: Unicode

Representing every language

The Unicode standard assigns a numerical code to every glyph in every human language.

1996: The Internet Archive

Saving the history of the web

Brewster Kahle founds the Internet Archive to begin systematically capturing and storing the state of the web.

1993: Tim Berners-Lee

A catalog of the web

Tim Berners-Lee creates the Virtual Library, the first systematic catalog of the web.

1998: Google

An engine to search the web

Google and other search engines provide highly efficient capabilities to do textual searches across the whole content of the web.

1994: QR Codes

Quick Response (QR) scannable barcodes are created in Japan, encoding information for computer eyes to read.


2000: Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Mapping every object in the universe

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey spends nearly a decade automatically mapping every visible object in the astronomical universe.

2003: Human Genome Project

The complete code of a human

The Human Genome Project is declared complete in finding a reference DNA sequence for every human.

2000: Web 2.0

Societally organized information

Social networking and other collective websites define a mechanism for collectively assembling information by and about people.

2004: Facebook

Capturing the social network

Facebook begins to capture social relations between people on a large scale.

2001: Wikipedia

Self-organized encyclopedia

Volunteer contributors assemble millions of pages of encyclopedia material, providing textual descriptions of practically all areas of human knowledge.

2004: OpenStreetMap

Steve Coast initiates a project to create a crowdsourced street-level map of the world.

2002: A New Kind of Science

Exploring the computational universe

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.

2009: Wolfram|Alpha

An engine for computational knowledge

Wolfram|Alpha is launched as a website that computes answers to natural-language queries based on a large collection of algorithms and curated data.

Timeline of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge

This art-quality 4'10" x 16" poster timeline of the History of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge includes nearly 200 entries spanning millennia of events that have shaped the modern world of data and knowledge. Presented in its original version at the 2010 Wolfram Data Summit, this fascinating and impressive large-scale poster is the perfect piece of intellectual art for your library, office, or other wall, and is a unique gift for any enthusiast of data, technology, and its history.