Frei H.P.

Abstract

Information Retrieval (IR) as a discipline did not originate from an urgent need of professionals to master today's information explosion. Nor is the content of the relatively small test collections employed in the past by IR research in line with the kind of information professionals are faced with at the present time. Only recently IR researchers have started to study real-life problems and have realized that the information which enterprises invariably encounter is highly unstructured, heterogenous, multi- and hypermedia, and of varying quality. Because of the requirements imposed by today's professional life, Information Technology (IT) software becomes increasingly complex. We argue in this paper that it is an advantage to use a framework approach--an advantage not only for operational IR applications but also for research purposes, particularly for the evaluation of indexing and retrieval techniques. The IR framework FIRE is being developed along these lines. The rationale for developing FIRE is discussed, and the structure and some of the basic properties of FIRE are explained.

[Fre96] Frei H.P.. Information Retrieval - from Academic Research to Practical Applications. In Proc 5th Annual Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval, pages 37-49, Las Vegas, April 1996.

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