Computer scientist and entrepreneur David Gelernter hopes so as he launches Scopeware, a new search technology based on musings in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds. As Gelernter proposed in Mirror Worlds, the idea of the folder-storage system found in almost all operating systems today will have to change radically as the glut of electronic information continues to grow. Gelernter says that it is absurd to name a file, place it in folder and then have to remember where the data is at a later date. His idea is to let the computer handle the work. Scopeware is designed to replace the folder hierarchy.
All data is presented as a chronology, rather than divided into folders and drives.
To find a piece of information, users scroll through the list or narrow it down with a keyword search. Gelernter aims to eliminate the need to use the Windows Explorer feature to find a file. The Scopeware Suite culls information from e-mail, text files, spreadsheets, Web pages and Portable Document Format files, presenting it to the user as a stream of thumbnail images in chronological order with the latest coming first. Users can highlight a document to get a larger image to see if it contains the information they need. The Scopeware application platform is written in Java and can sit on just about any server operating system.