METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATED, CONTEXT-DEPENDENT RETRIEVAL OF INFORMATION

Documents stored in a database are searched for relevance to contextual information, instead of (or in addition to) similar text. Each stored document is indexed in term of meta-information specifying contextual information about the document. Current contextual information is acquired, either from the user or the current computational or physical environment, and this "meta-information" is used as the basis for identifying stored documents of possible relevance.