Information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) is the art and science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describes documents, or searching within databases, whether relational stand alone databases or hypertext networked databases such as the Internet or intranets, for text, sound, images or data. There is a common confusion, however, between data, document, information, and text retrieval, and each of these have their own bodies of literature, theory, praxis and technologies.
IR is a broad interdisciplinary field, that draws on many other disciplines. Indeed, because it is so broad, it is normally poorly understood, being approached typically from only one perspective or another. It stands at the junction of many established fields, and draws upon cognitive psychology, information architecture, information design, human information behaviour, linguistics, semiotics, information science, computer science and librarianship.
Web Search Engines such as Google and Lycos are amongst the most visible applications of Information retrieval research.
See also: Geographic Information System
See also: Digital Libraries
See also: Spoken Document Retrieval
See also: Cross-language information retrieval
Major Figures in Information Retrieval: Gerald Salton, W Bruce Croft, Karen SpÃÂärck Jones, C. J. van Rijsbergen