L3. ORGANIZATION {AND,OR,VS} RETRIEVAL (9/2)

2 September 2009

Information organization raises more fundamental issues than retrieval, so we'll start the course with IO and then move on to IR and other language processing applications. But we need a highlevel view of the information life cycle and search/retrieval models so that we have some concepts on which to base forward links from IO to IR.  In particular, we'll discuss how organization and retrieval trade off against each other;  the more we organize, the easier it is to retrieve and use information later.  How much effort we can or should put into organization depends on the relationship between the producer and consumer of the information and their respective organizational contexts.  Who does the work and who gets the benefit?  As you'll see, Svenonius and Weinberger have strongly contrasting opinions about this.