DIALOG Information Services
DIALOG is a leading online information retrieval service, 1965- .
DIALOG started at the Lockheed Corporation in 1965 initiated by Roger Summit as part of a RECON project sponsored by the NASA and led by him for many years.
Timeline at [1]
Service
In 1960, Roger Summit, a doctoral student at Stanford University, took a summer job at Lockheed Information Sciences Laboratory, where he was assigned to work on problems of information retrieval. Influenced by Hans Peter Luhn and the ideas of Key Word In Context (KWIC) indexing and Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI), he completed a doctoral dissertation on the topic. He encouraged Lockheed to investigate and in 1965 Lockheed charged him lead a design team.
Criteria were that the system had to be usable by end users without the intervention of computing staff and it had to be interactive and recursive so that searchers could immediately see their results and modify their queries accordingly. Also, for users, an alphabetical list of searchable terms near a desired term and the number of items in the database containing that term.
This design was used in a RECON project for NASA. Remote access was added. Numerous additional resources and customers were added. By 1985 DIALOG had become the most comprehensive online information service in the world, with more than 200 separate databases.
Ownership
As an organization, DIALOG became "Dialog Information Services, Inc." which was purchased by Knight-Ridder Corp. in in 1981 it and became "Knight-Ridder Information" in 1987. Purchased by Maid Corp. it became "The Dialog Corp." in 1997 and purchased by Thomson in 2000. ProQuest purchased DIALOG in 2008 then by Clarivate in 2023.[2]