Definition
In the Boolean model for Information Retrieval (IR), a document collection is a set of documents, and an index term is the subset of documents indexed by the term itself. An index term can also be seen as a proposition which asserts whether the term is a property of a document, that is, if the term occurs in the document or, in other words, if the document is about the concept represented by the term.
The interpretation of a query is set-theoretical. In practice, a query is a Boolean expression where the set operators are the usual intersection, union, and complement, and the operands are index terms. The document subsets which correspond to the index terms of the query are combined through the set operators. The system returns the documents which belong to the subset expressed by the query and make the query true.
Historical Background
The Boolean model for IRwas proposed as a paradigm for accessing large-scale systems since the 1950s. The idea of composing queries as...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Bar-Hillel Y. Language and information. Reading: Addison-Wesley; 1964.
Belkin NJ, Cool C, Croft WB, Callan JP. The effect of multiple query representations on information retrieval system performance. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1993. p. 339–46.
Blair D. Language and representation in information retrieval. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1990.
Cooper W. Getting beyond Boole. Inform Process Manage. 1988;24:243–48.
Croft W, Turtle H, Lewis D. The use of phrases and structured queries in information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1991. p. 32–45.
Croft W, Metzler D, Strohman T. Search engines: information retrieval in practice. Boston: Addison Wesley; 2009.
Fuhr N. Probabilistic datalog – a logic for powerful retrieval methods. In: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1995.
Grefenstette G, editor. Cross-language information retrieval. International series on information retrieval. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic; 1998.
Hersh W, Hickam D. An evaluation of interactive boolean and natural language searching with an online medical textbook. J Am Soc Inform Sci. 1995;46(7):478–89.
Hull D. A weighted boolean model for cross language text retrieval. In: Grefenstette G, editor. Cross-language information retrieval. Boston: Kluwer. p. 119–36.
Korfhage R. Information storage and retrieval. New York: Wiley; 1997.
Kowalski G, Maybury M. Information retrieval systems: theory and implementation. Dordecht: Kluwer; 2000.
Lancaster F, Warner A. Information retrieval today. Arlington: Information Resources; 1993.
Lee J. Properties of extended boolean models in information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 17th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1994. p. 182–90.
Lee J, Kim W, Kim M, Lee Y. On the evaluation of boolean operators in the extended boolean retrieval framework. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1993. p. 291–97.
Melucci M. Introduction to information retrieval and quantum mechanics. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer; 2015.
Nie JY, Lepage F. Toward a broader logical model for information retrieval. In: Crestani F, Lalmas M, van Rijsbergen CJ, editors. Uncertainty and logics: advanced models for the representation and retrieval of information. Boston/Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press; 1998. p. 17–38.
Radecki T. Generalized boolean methods of information retrieval. Int J Man Mach Stud. 1983;18(5):407–39.
van Rijsbergen C. The geometry of information retrieval. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004.
Wong S, Ziarko W, Raghavan V, Wong P. Extended boolean query processing in the generalized vector space model. Inform Syst. 1989;14(1):47–63.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Melucci, M. (2018). Boolean Model. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_917
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_917
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering