Media: First Monday offers Information Retrieval Guidance

Taking us through her 'pet peeves', Martha Bates writes a thorough and readable guide to the subtleties of information retrieval for First Monday: "After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time". She concludes that the following improvements in Web information retrieval design are going to improve the quality of services offered by those who survived the late-1990's 'dot-bomb':

'* Use faceted classifications, rather than hierarchical.
* Develop an understanding of what distinguishes information classifications and vocabularies from the physical-world equivalents, and stop using the misleading term "ontology."
* Use the many vocabularies specifically designed for information retrieval, rather than general English language vocabularies.
* Understand and work with the underlying statistical characteristics of information in designing information retrieval. Failing to understand these factors simply leads to sub-optimal systems.
* Recognize that systems of information description are extremely size-sensitive. Design for all anticipated database size ranges from the beginning.
* Be kind to your indexers: Design a targeted indexing-support system specifically for your human staff, and you will save much staff time.
* If you develop a site with any information retrieval component at all, then hire information expertise.'

The article develops these themes more fully by showing the weaknesses of much out there at present.

Associated Link: First Monday: After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time

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