Information Storage and Retrieval Essays

Information Storage and Retrieval Essays Information Storage and Retrieval Essay Information Storage and Retrieval Essay Introduction Information retrieval is a science related to documents and information searching. Information retrieval deals with the storage and representation of knowledge and the retrieval of information relevant to a specific user problem (Mandhl, 2007). Information retrieval technology mostly used in universities and public library to help students or information users to access to books, journals and other information resources that they needed. It also applies at organizations which having large collection of documents or information. In â€Å"The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval† article written by Michael Lesk, mentions the idea of information retrieval starting popular in year 1945. However, the use of information retrieval was started in 1880, where Herman Hollerith invents the recording of data on a machine readable medium (Wikipedia). This article has made good contribution to the field by describing the history of the IR systems from 1945 to 1996 with abundant information on the various technologies developed, IR systems built, and how they affected the research in IR. Based on his article, I observed and learned three important elements of information retrieval. Elements Observed and Learned from the Article 1. Effectiveness of Information Retrieval System One of the important things when developing a system is how it can help to human managing the tasks effectively. Technology provides a tool used to help information users to search for information or documents. The general objective of an Information Retrieval System is to minimize the overhead of a user locating needed information (Kowalski Maybury, 2000). Overhead can be expressed as a processed that users need to go through to seek the information. Even the success of systems is subjective; in my opinion the important element of information retrieval system is the accuracy of information provided to information seekers. Precision can be defined as a fraction of the documents retrieved that are relevant to the users information need (Wikipedia). In this article, we can found many researches were done to enhanced accuracy for information retrieval. One of it is a research by Cyril Cleverdon from Cranfield College of Aeronautics (now Cranfield Institute of Technology) has develop the athematics of `recall (fraction of relevant documents retrieved) and `precision (fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant) to measures the precision of information retrieval systems in 1960s. He found that if an information retrieval system simply retrieves more documents, it is likely to increase recall (with more retrieved documents, a larger fra ction of the relevant ones are likely to appear) but to decrease precision (there are more chances to get more not relevant documents). 2. Flexibility of Information Retrieval System When dealing with information retrieval one of the important things is the flexibility to search the information. Information seekers may not know what exactly that they looking for. Hence a flexible information retrieval system can help them to overcome this problem. In 1970s, a group of Artificial Intelligent (AI) experts from Yale come out with programs to mapped information into standard patterns. This program allows phrase of word mapped into keywords. For example, the word â€Å"apple† can be mapped to the company Apple, the fruit apple, and the tree apple. As another example, the phrase â€Å"Harry Potter† can represent a movie, a book, a character, a game, etc. AI researcher group constructed such schemas for a number of common activities, e. g. ordering in restaurants, and then took natural language descriptions of these activities, picked out the information that appeared to fit slots in the frames, and thus constructed a semi-formal representation of the information. They could then take queries about such subjects, e. g. vehicle accidents on the United Press newswire, and retrieve actual answers. These programs ran on a restricted set of examples, and produced much argument about whether they were in the end going to develop into practical retrieval systems. This flexibility can help information seekers to broader their finding while searching for information. Another criterion of information retrieval searching flexibility which was mentioned in this article is the free-text search option. Full text search refers to a technique for searching a computer-stored document or database. In a full text search, the search engine examines all of the words in every stored document as it tries to match search words supplied by the user (Wikipedia). The good example of free text search in information retrieval is a web search engines. One of the search engines using full text search technique is AltaVista. Even the free text provide flexibility to do searching, the results are not good as controlled vocabulary searching. 3. Copyright Issue in Digital Storage In digital era, mostly all types of information are available in digital format. In today world, we can purchase book online, purchase an e-book, journal or article from internet, and reading news paper/magazine online. It was noted that online publish won’t pose a problem for academic publishing, but will do for commercial. The most obvious problems relate to digital information is some potential problems such as illegal copying (pirating in today’s terms) and copyright law. This problem destroyed the computer games industry in the late 1970s, and is extremely serious for the software industry right now in many countries including Malaysia. Lately, many researchers done a study to review current copyright and related laws and their impact on digital preservation, as well as to make recommendations to help libraries, archives and other preservation institutions sustain digital works. Analysis of Information Retrieval Transformation The transformation of information retrieval parallels such a life. This article uses Shakespeare’s concept of seven ages of man to describe/predict the evolution of Information Retrieval from 1945 to 2010. In my opinion, technologies play an important role in the transformation and development of information retrieval. Started in childhood era in 1950s, the first systems of information retrieval were built based on technology available on that era, such as the use of overlapping codes on edge-notched cards by Calvin Mooers. In schoolboy era starting from 1960s, the first large scale information systems were built. NASA researchers introduce a mechanical machine for searching of manual indexing. This machine helps to facilitate search of indexing documents rather than manually searching which take longer time. Throughout this period, there was relatively little actual computerized retrieval going on. Computers can search indexes must better than human, which demanded more detailed indexing. During 1970s, the development of computer and word processing technology improving the way information retrieval works because lots of text was available in machine-readable form. Another key technology during 1970s is the availability of time sharing system which make retrieval system more practical especially to librarian. In 1980s, the widespread use of CD-ROM was a key technology change, which fit well with traditional information publishing economics and developed into a real threat to the online systems. Computer networking technology also develops in this decade and as a result there was an enormous increase in the number of databases available online. Lastly, the internet technology revolution in 1990s also helps to improve the way people retrieving information. In other hand, internet revolution also cause information overload problem. We can see most people sharing their information to internet but admittedly much of the information available in internet is low in term of quality because no authority responsible to evaluate the published information. From the facts above, it shows that the technology have influences to the transformation of information retrieval. REFERENCE Kowalski, G. and Maybury, M. T. Information storage and retrieval systems: theory and implementation. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Mandhl, T. (2007). â€Å"Recent Developments in the Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems: Moving Towards Diversity and Practical Relevance†, Informatica, pp. 27-38. Wikipedia (2011). â€Å"Information retrieval†, Retrieve from http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Information_retrieval