Relevance (information retrieval)
In information science, the question of the relevance of documents is an important issue in information retrieval and an important criterion of the quality of information. It is important to distinguish between subjective relevance ( pertinence ), objective relevance, estimated relevance and situational relevance.
Relevance types
- Subjective relevance ( pertinence ) is the " relationship between a document and an information need " of a person and indicate the perceived usefulness of the document by the user in relation to the information needs of the person.
- Objective relevance is a construct that specifies the relationship between an information request and a proposed document evaluated by neutral observers ( experts round).
- Estimated relevance ( relevance System ) is also a " relationship between a query and a document ", which results from rules that a computerized search system, the importance of a document for a search query weighted ( value = relevance ).
- Situational relevance is the (actual ) usefulness of the document in terms of the task from which the information need arose is out.
Lenses relevance of a document
A document is relevant to a search query ( objectively )
- If it is objectively in preparation for a decision
- If it is objectively closes a gap in knowledge
- If it is objectively met an early warning function.
Search engines use criteria of relevance to sort documents on the issue ( " relevance ranking "). There are different types of distributions of the relevance of documents to a topic, of which the most important are informetric ( power law ) and the inverse logistic.
Swell
- Stefano Mizzaro: Relevance: The whole history. In: Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 48, 1997, pp. 810-832.
- Wolfgang G. Stock: On relevance distributions. In: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 57, 2006, pp. 1126-1129.
- Wolfgang G. Stock: information retrieval. Search and find information. Oldenbourg, München 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58172-0, pp. 68-81 (Chapter 6, relevance and pertinence ).