 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | This will be the third edition of the highly successful 'Text Information Retrieval Systems'. The book's purpose is to teach people who will be searching or designing text retrieval systems how the systems work. For designers, it covers problems they will face and reviews currently available solutions to provide a basis for more advanced study. For the searcher its purpose is to describe why such systems work as they do. The book is primarily about computer-based retrieval systems, but the principles apply to nonmechanized ones as well. The book covers the nature of information, how it is organized for use by a computer, how search functions are carried out, and some of the theory underlying these functions. As well, it discusses the interaction between user and system and how retrieved items, users, and complete systems are evaluated. A limited knowledge of mathematics and of computing is assumed.
This third edition will be updated to include coverage of the WWW and current search engines. In many cases, examples of non-web searching will be replaced with web-based illustrations. Coverage of interfaces, various features available to assist searchers, and areas in which search assistance is not available will also be covered. In addition, the book will have a web dimension which will include relevant material available online, to be used in conjunction with the text.
*Follow-up to the award winning 2nd Edition
*Focuses on computer-based sytem but basic principles can be applied to any information seeking context |
Average Customer Rating:   not [much] about web searching The book takes the reader through a quick summary of the history of text IRS. Mostly, the readership is assumed to be librarians. Whose task is to search for information. Much of the book has a traditional feel, describing a discipline that strives to be precise and orderly. Most famously, with the imposition of a cataloging system, like the Dewey or Library of Congress methods.
The book also deals with recent changes. Most notably the Web. There is some consideration of the problem of dealing with and trying to classify web sites and web pages. But this is not a text on web search engines, per se. That has proved to be a vast economically important field. It's just not covered much here.
Important ideas are still explained, that are also germane to those readers involved in web searching. Like having an ontology of well defined terms. Or having a consistent metadata schema, as with the Dublin Core.
This book reminds me of texts in the early 90s, that covered SGML. Mostly for publishers. Just as the SGML-inspired HTML started taking off with the new Web. The SGML books were correct, but limited in their audience, while a much larger world of HTML was emerging. Likewise here. The ideas bubbling around the Dublin Core and ontologies are really not being driven by traditional printed texts, or even the databases that exist, but are not on the web. |  |
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