TECHNOLOGY WATCH:

Responsa Project wins Israel Prize
By MATTHEW WAGNER (Jerusalem Post)

Imagine taking an obscure corpus of religious legal decisions that spans nearly two millennia, four continents and a half a million documents that is written in an ancient Semitic language, and making every single detail accessible within seconds via computer search.

And imagine doing this in the 1960s while fighting an uphill battle against an academic community that was skeptical at best, and often downright antagonistic.

That is precisely what Prof. Aviezri Fraenkel of the Weizmann Institute did. The result of his labors, the Responsa Project [Proyeht Hashut] won this year's Israel Award for the Works of Judaism category.

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n 1962, MIT's Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote: "Any scheme of directly comparing a request formulation with a straightforward one-to-one encoding of the original document must be regarded as wholly utopian and unsubstantiated."

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Today, Fraenkel's method for IR is used by Google, AltaVista, Lycos and other search engines, while the manual-index method preferred by Hebrew University is a relic of the past.

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I wonder who we're laughing at right now who is working on the technological development that's going to change the face of the field in the next generation. Someone, I hope.