The amounts of information that mankind produces are vast, running into billions of
documents. Traditional ways of holding this information have become impractical and so
methods of storage are being switched from paper and microfiche to magnetic and optical
discs. In the last thirty years as more information has been put onto computers, work has gone
into using the computer to get away from the restrictiveness of manual indexing and move
towards a more flexible system of information acquisition.
Many companies exist offering (for a price) the opportunity to access the information stored on
their systems. Unfortunately, most of these companies use software that was developed in the
sixties when the field of information retrieval (IR) was still very young. This means that the
services they offer are rather primitive. The Financial Times’ IR service, Profile is typical of
such commercial systems. It has been the aim of the NRT project to investigate ways of
incorporating the new ideas in IR, that have occurred in the last ten to fifteen years, into Profile
