"The $4.7 billion question has a free answer. It's been waiting in UNESCO archives for forty years."
Research demonstrating that modern billion-dollar vector database systems are unconsciously recreating the architectural principles of UNESCO's 1985 CDS/ISIS system.
Title: The Authority of Neural Scale
Target: Communications of the ACM (Contributed Article)
Document: caprazli-neural-scale.pdf
The information retrieval industry is spending $4.7 billion to rediscover a solution distributed for free in 1985. We demonstrate that eight modern systems—FAISS, DiskANN, ScaNN, SPANN, TiDAR, Pinecone, Weaviate, and continuous batching—have independently converged on CDS/ISIS architectural principles.
We propose:
- Two-Level Theory: Separating semantic understanding (Level 1) from structural organization (Level 2)
- Neural-to-Symbolic Bridge: Framework projecting 10x cost reduction ($2.4M → $240k/year)
| Modern "Innovation" | CDS/ISIS Principle (1985) |
|---|---|
| FAISS Inverted Files | Inverted File Indexing |
| DiskANN Vamana Graph | B-tree Navigation |
| ScaNN Quantization | Variable-Length Encoding |
| SPANN Clustering | Field Independence Axiom |
| Continuous Batching | Variable Records (ISO 2709) |
neural-symbolic-ir-paper1/
├── paper1-convergence/
│ ├── manuscript/
│ │ ├── caprazli-neural-scale.tex # LaTeX source
│ │ ├── caprazli-neural-scale.pdf # Compiled paper
│ │ ├── references.bib # 21 references
│ │ └── submission/ # Submission package
│ └── literature/ # Research sources
└── shared/
└── acmart-primary/ # ACM LaTeX templates
Kafkas M. Caprazli
Independent Researcher, Wolfsburg, Germany
ORCID: 0000-0002-5744-8944
Former member of FAO teams implementing CDS/ISIS-based information systems (AGRIS, CARIS, ASFA, DOCREP). Co-author of research on unified authority files presented at ECDL 2003.
@article{caprazli2025authority,
author = {Caprazli, Kafkas M.},
title = {The Authority of Neural Scale},
journal = {Communications of the ACM},
year = {2025},
note = {Submitted December 2025}
}This research represents human-AI collaborative work. The author extensively collaborated with Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, and Gemini Pro for literature synthesis and drafting. The core insight—that modern systems are unconsciously converging on CDS/ISIS principles—represents the author's original contribution.
© 2025 Kafkas M. Caprazli. All rights reserved.
Academic use permitted with citation. For other uses, contact the author.