Week 1 Reading

FOA 1.1

FOA, or Finding Out About is a process of a decision making based on others knowledge. Process of FOA can be drawn in various ways, depending on type of information you need and tools you use to find this information. Three phases of FOA can be described as:

Step_1. Asking a question

Step_2. Constructing an answer

Step_3. Assessing the answer

Even though steps 1 and 2 are main and crucial parts of FOA, the IR process will not be completed properly without step 3. Without knowing that delivered information satisfied the user need, IR process can not be considered as complete.

IES 1.1-1.2

I agree with authors idea of IR as a process of representing, searching, and manipulating large collections of electronic text, but I think that while text and other human-language data represent biggest part of available knowledge, there are other very important ways of representing information and they shouldn't be left of by IR system.

Simple IR system architecture: Information need -> query -> search engine comparison with inverted indexes for collection of documents -> result list.

Another interesting example of the IR application is a desktop and file system search, where system has to access data directly, instead of ranking, due to the rapid changes in the file system.

MIR 1.1-1.4

There are two distinct points of view on IR:

Computer-centered

Human-centered

The main IR goal is to retrieve all the relevant documents while returning as few non-relevant documents as possible.  

Even though IR problem and solutions appeared long time ago, it’s glorious days began with creation of world wide web, which shaped it in the way we know it now. Since www is relatively new it’s IR systems still have some issues, that are important to address.