Books in the Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services series

Everybody knows what relevance is. It is a "ya'know" notion, concept, ideäno need to explain whatsoever. Searching for relevant information using information technology (IT) became a ubiquitous activity in contemporary information society. Relevant information means information that pertains to the matter or problem at hand¿it is directly connected with effective communication. The purpose of this book is to trace the evolution and with it the history of thinking and research on relevance in information science and related fields from the human point of view. The objective is to synthesize what we have learned about relevance in several decades of investigation about the notion in information science. This book deals with how people deal with relevance¿it does not cover how systems deal with relevance; it does not deal with algorithms. Spurred by advances in information retrieval (IR) and information systems of various kinds in handling of relevance, a number of basic questionsare raised: But what is relevance to start with? What are some of its properties and manifestations? How do people treat relevance? What affects relevance assessments? What are the effects of inconsistent human relevance judgments on tests of relative performance of different IR algorithms or approaches? These general questions are discussed in detail.

We are well into a second age of digital information. Our information is moving from the desktop to the laptop to the "palmtop" and up into an amorphous cloud on the Web. How can one manage both the challenges and opportunities of this new world of digital information? What does the future hold? This book provides an important update on the rapidly expanding field of personal information management (PIM). Part I (Always and Forever) introduces the essentials of PIM. Information is personal for many reasons. It's the information on our hard drives we couldn't bear to lose. It's the information about us that we don't want to share. It's the distracting information demanding our attention even as we try to do something else. It's the information we don't know about but need to. Through PIM, we control personal information. We integrate information into our lives in useful ways. We make it "ours." With basics established, Part I proceeds to explore a critical interplay between personal information "always" at hand through mobile devices and "forever" on the Web. How does information stay "ours" in such a world?Part II (Building Places of Our Own for Digital Information) will be available in the Summer of 2012, and will consist of the following chapters:Chapter 5. Technologies to eliminate PIM?: We have seen astonishing advances in the technologies of information management -- in particular, to aid in the storing, structuring and searching of information. These technologies will certainly change the way we do PIM; will they eliminate the need for PIM altogether?Chapter 6. GIM and the social fabric of PIM: We don't (and shouldn't) manage our information in isolation. Group information management (GIM) -- especially the kind practiced more informally in households and smaller project teams -- goes hand in glove with good PIM.Chapter 7. PIM by design: Methodologies, principles, questions and considerations as we seek to understand PIM better and to build PIM into our tools, techniques and training.Chapter 8. To each of us, our own.: Just as we must each be a student of our own practice of PIM, we must also be a designer of this practice. This concluding chapter looks at tips, traps and tradeoffs as we work to build a practice of PIM and "places" of our own for personal information.Table of Contents: A New Age of Information / The Basics of PIM / Our Information, Always at Hand / Our Information, Forever on the Web

This book is the third of a three-part series on taxonomies, and covers putting your taxonomy into use in as many ways as possible to maximize retrieval for your users. Chapter 1 suggests several items to research and consider before you start your implementation and integration process. It explores the different pieces of software that you will need for your system and what features to look for in each. Chapter 2 launches with a discussion of how taxonomy terms can be used within a workflow, connecting twöor more¿taxonomies, and intelligent coordination of platforms and taxonomies. Microsoft SharePoint is a widely used and popular program, and I consider their use of taxonomies in this chapter. Following that is a discussion of taxonomies and semantic integration and then the relationship between indexing and the hierarchy of a taxonomy. Chapter 3 (¿How is a Taxonomy Connected to Search?¿) provides discussions and examples of putting taxonomies into use in practical applications. Itdiscusses displaying content based on search, how taxonomy is connected to search, using a taxonomy to guide a searcher, tools for search, including search engines, crawlers and spiders, and search software, the parts of a search-capable system, and then how to assemble that search-capable system. This chapter also examines how to measure quality in search, the different kinds of search, and theories on search from several famous theoreticians¿two from the 18th and 19th centuries, and two contemporary. Following that is a section on inverted files, parsing, discovery, and clustering. While you probably don¿t need a comprehensive understanding of these concepts to build a solid, workable system, enough information is provided for the reader to see how they fit into the overall scheme. This chapter concludes with a look at faceted search and some possibilities for search interfaces. Chapter 4, ¿Implementing a Taxonomy in a Database or on a Website,¿ starts where many content systems really should¿with the authors, or at least the people who create the content. This chapter discusses matching up various groups of related data to form connections, data visualization and text analytics, and mobile and e-commerce applications for taxonomies. Finally, Chapter 5 presents some educated guesses about the future of knowledge organization. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / On Your Mark, Get Ready ¿. WAIT! Things to Know Before You Start the Implementation Step / Taxonomy and Thesaurus Implementation / How is a Taxonomy Connected to Search? / Implementing a Taxonomy in a Database or on a Website / What Lies Ahead for Knowledge Organization? / Glossary / End Notes / Author Biography

The Answer Machine is a practical, non-technical guide to the technologies behind information seeking and analysis. It introduces search and content analytics to software buyers, knowledge managers, and searchers who want to understand and design effective online environments. The book describes how search evolved from an expert-only to an end user tool. It provides an overview of search engines, categorization and clustering, natural language processing, content analytics, and visualization technologies. Detailed profiles for Web search, eCommerce search, eDiscovery, and enterprise search contrast the types of users, uses, tasks, technologies, and interaction designs for each. These variables shape each application, although the underlying technologies are the same. Types of information tasks and the trade-offs between precision and recall, time, volume and precision, and privacy vs. personalization are discussed within this context. The book examines trends toward convenient, context-aware computing, big data and analytics technologies, conversational systems, and answer machines. The Answer Machine explores IBM Watson's DeepQA technology and describes how it is used to answer health care and Jeopardy questions. The book concludes by discussing the implications of these advances: how they will change the way we run our businesses, practice medicine, govern, or conduct our lives in the digital age. Table of Contents: Introduction / The Query Process and Barriers to Finding Information Online / Online Search: An Evolution / Search and Discovery Technologies: An Overview / Information Access: A Spectrum of Needs and Uses / Future Tense: The Next Era in Information Access and Discovery / Answer Machines