On the Foundations of Information Retrieval
Stefano Mizzaro · 1996
Information overloading is one of the major problems of the Information Society, and it is experienced by many people. Information retrieval is aimed at solving such problem, and hence it is a crucial discipline of this new era. Despite its centrality, information retrieval has its own shortcomings: for instance, most of Internet users have discovered with excitement the information retrieval systems available on Internet (the so called 'search engines'), but they have also experienced how often the performance of such services is too low, very far from an ideal 100%. The lackness of a formal account is probably one of the most evident of these shortcomings: concepts like information, information need and relevance are neither well understood nor formally defined. This paper sketches a cognitive framework that permits to analyze these central concepts of the information retrieval scenario. The cognitive framework consists of concepts as cognitive agents acting in the world, knowledge s...