ENQUIRE was an early project (in the second half of 1980) of Tim Berners-Lee, who went on to create the World Wide Web in 1991. ENQUIRE has some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but is different in several important ways, one of them that it was not supposed to be released to the general public.

Rather than a web browser, ENQUIRE was closer to a wiki:

• database, though a closed system (all of the data could be taken as a workable whole)
• bidirectional hyperlinks (in Wikipedia and MediaWiki, this is the What links here feature). This bidirectionnality allows ideas, notes, etc. to link to each other without the author being aware of this. In a way, they (or, at least, their relationships) get a life on their own.
• direct edition from the server (like wikis and CMS/blogs)
• ease of compositing, particularly when it comes to hyperlinking.

See also

• ARPANET

External links

• ENQUIRE Manual
• Tim Berners-Lee FAQ including ENQUIRE information

ENQUIRE | ENQUIRE