Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval

This assignment will examine various instances of information retrieval found in the public domain today and analyse the contrasting levels of description labour found within each one. The system and searches shown will be discussed with reference to the following key concepts, the selection power enabled by the system, description labour undertaken by the system producer and the amount of search labour involved within each example.

“Information retrieval is the science and technology concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of information for the subsequent use by interested parties” (Crestani F. & Lalmas M, 2000). The central problem in IR is the quest to find the set of relevant documents, which is usually amongst a large collection, containing the information sought thereby satisfying an information need usually expressed by a user with a query.

The idea of using computers to search for relevant pieces of information for was popularized in an article �As We May Think’ by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Thereafter the first implementations of information retrieval systems were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then description processes, such as the creation of indexes from records, which, under pre-modern conditions, were carried out by human syntactic labour have been largely transferred to technology, strongly implying a desire to avoid the costs of direct human labour.

“The ultimate economic reason for software development is the mechanization of mental labour and intellectual work (Nake 1992).

Selection power is understood as the human ability to make informed choices between objects or representations of objects (Warner 2007b) and has been conceived as the primary aim for information retrieval systems. Selection power is valued by a searcher as an end in itself and also reduces their labour in searching. For information retrieval systems, selection power is produced by selection labour, which itself separates historically into description and search labour.

Description labour is understood to include document description, and classification, or subject categorization. Description labour tends to try and increase the selection power of the searcher and reduce their search labour. “Description labour can also involve more standardised verbal descriptions to existing verbal objects e.g. written documents, database management systems (DBMS) etc” (Warner 2007a).

Search labour is understood as the work conducted by the searcher in selecting desired objects from the mass of data available. It can be conducted at various levels of aggregation, for instance, choosing between systems or between representations within a system.

Selection labour and its components of description and search labour are understood as forms of mental labour. For mental labour, as for physical and productive labour, aspects of direct human labour could be transferred to humanly

constructed technology, where it would be transformed into a machine process.

Semantic mental labour, the labour involved in transformations motivated by the meaning of signs, remained irreducibly directly human, while syntactic labour, the labour required for pattern motivated transformations, could be delegated to technology (Warner 2007a). The transfer of syntactic mental labour to technology tended to be compelled by the lower costs of machine processes, with the discrepancy in costs between human labour and machine processes becoming increasingly acute with modern technologies.

Figure 1: shows the Representation of synthesis between the mentioned concepts

(Warner 2007c)

Digital Libraries

Digital libraries are prominent within the public domain as examples of information retrieval systems. The main objective of a digital library (like other IR systems) is to fulfil the needs of its users. A primary necessity is to make digital resources accessible using a computer network. A crucial part of digital libraries is that its information is managed, persistent and reliable.

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) was established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2000 as a free online library which directs users to exemplary resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and research. NSDL provides an organized point of access to STEM content that is aggregated from a variety of other digital libraries, NSF-funded projects, publishers, and NSDL-reviewed web sites. (NSDL 2007)

Figure 1: Home page of NSDL

NSDL is available as a free online resource with largely syntactically generated search facilities and is a good example of the distinction between syntactic and semantic labour. Descriptions are created by human semantic work and verbal objects are described with the aim of creating more systematic descriptions than those which would be given by transcription of the verbal objects. These systematic descriptions aim to increase the selection power of the searcher and reduce their labour. There is also evidence on the site of syntactic labour being transformed into a machine process. For example, humanly created descriptions would be automatically transformed into searchable indexes. Also contained within the website is a recent innovation called �expert voices’. Here the user can interact with experts through a �library-integrated blogging system’ and share information on areas which interest the user. This shows a high amount of human description labour and and the necessity for expertise. Figure 2 shows this new innovation with different areas of interest broken down into central categories from which the user can select:

Figure 2:

NSDL is a highly structure information retrieval system which also uses algorithms for syntactic processing and indexing of written language. This involves record creation standards for cataloguing, subject description of resources, and also the involvement of human semantic work.

E-Commerce sites

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically