Information Retrieval System Functions

Abstract

In order to understand the technologies associated with an Information Retrieval system, an understanding of the goals and objectives of information retrieval systems along with the user’s functions is needed. This background helps in understanding some of the technical drivers on final implementation. To place Information Retrieval Systems into perspective, it’s also useful to discuss how they are the same and differ from other information handling systems such as Database Management Systems and Digital Libraries. The major processing subsystems in an information retrieval system are outlined to see the global architecture concerns. The precision and recall metrics are introduced early since they provide the basis behind explaining the impacts of algorithms and functions throughout the rest of the architecture discussion.