GERARD (GERRY) SALTON
| Date | 01 January 1996 |
| Pages | 1-2 |
| Published date | 01 January 1996 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026959 |
| Author | MARISTELLA AGOSTI,MICHELINE BEAULIEU,CYRIL CLEVERDON,HANS‐PETER FREI,NORBERT FUHR,DAVID HARPER,PETER INGWERSEN,MICHAEL KEEN,RAINER KUHLEN,STEPHEN ROBERTSON,ALAN SMEATON,KAREN SPARCK JONES,KEITH VAN RUSBERGEN,PETER WILLETT |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
THE
Journal of Documentation
VOLUME 52 NUMBER 1 MARCH 1996
GERARD (GERRY) SALTON
Sir,
We write to record our debt, and that of our colleagues, to one of the founding
fathers of information retrieval, Gerard (Gerry) Salton, who died on 28th August
1995 in Ithaca,
NY
at the age of
68.
Information retrieval was established as a
new academic discipline by a small number of pioneers, Gerry among them, who
recognised the need for, and the research challenges presented by, the automated
indexing, storage and retrieval of text documents. He brought academic rigour
and scholarship to establishing the foundations of this discipline, and we
acknowledge his influential contributions to the theory, experimental methods,
and practice of information retrieval.
Gerry Salton was born in Germany but became an American citizen in 1952.
After
BA
and MA degrees at Brooklyn College, he went to Harvard University,
where he was the last of Howard Aiken's PhD students and subsequently an
Assistant Professor. He moved to Cornell University in 1965 to assist in the
setting up of the Department of Computer Science and remained there for the
rest of his life. Gerry's name will always be associated with the SMART system,
which was first established at Harvard at a time when the very idea of manip-
ulating documents in a computer was alien to many and computers themselves
very limited in their capacities. The system rapidly matured to the stage where
it was, for many years, probably the most advanced information retrieval system
in the world, and it still remains a powerful experimental vehicle. A remarkable
number of the topics of concern in information retrieval down the years were
first studied by workers on the SMART project. Even by the early seventies, there
was already a huge body of work on, for example, statistically-based term
weighting schemes, automatic thesaurus construction, and relevance feedback
(all of which are detailed in the ground-breaking series of reports entitled
Information Storage and Retrieval); more recently, there have been substantive
contributions developing these earlier ideas for full text processing and searching,
for instance in the use of phrases in indexing and in passage retrieval. Gerry's
most important contribution is probably the vector space model, which not only
Journal
of
Documentation,
vol. 52, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 1-2
1
To continue reading
Request your trial