Page 129 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes Despite the limited results, many theorists predict that the evolution of such systems will eventually
replace manual classification systems.

Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems

The contrast between the value placed on discriminatory power in discussions of indexing and
classification and on the transformation of a query into a set of relevant records dominant in information
retrieval research has not been fully explored. The value of delivering relevant records in response to
a query has been assumed by information retrieval research paradigms otherwise differentiated (the
cognitive and the physical).
Subsidiary concepts and measures (relevance and precision and recall) have been increasingly
subjected to critiques. The founding assumption of the value of delivering relevant records now
needs to be questioned. An enhanced capacity for informed choice is advocated as an alternative
principle for system evaluation and design. This broadly corresponds to: the exploratory capability
discussed in recent information retrieval research; the value of discriminatory power in classification
and indexing; Giambattista Vico’s critique of the unproductivity of Aristotelian methods of
categorisation as routes to new knowledge; and, most significantly, to ordinary discourse conceptions
of the value of information retrieval systems.
The criterion of enhanced choice has a liberating effect, restoring man as an artificer and enabling a
continuing dialectic between theory and practice. Techniques developed in classic information
retrieval research can be adapted to the new purpose. Finally, the substitution of the principle of
enhanced choice exemplifies the development of a true science, in which previous paradigms are
absorbed into new as special cases.
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs: the valu’d file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous Nature
Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive
Particular addition, from the bill
That writes them all alike;
Shakespeare. Macbeth. c.1606.

Historical Value

The epigraph indicates the value which has been historically attached to subtlety of distinctions in
the language or lexicon of information retrieval systems. In this respect, the passage anticipates the
principle formulated in modern discussions of indexing and classification that the value of an index
term lies in its discriminatory power. In this principle, and in its historical anticipation, there is a
strong, although largely unnoticed, contrast with the assumption of information retrieval research,
particularly experimental information retrieval research, that the performance of an information
retrieval system is to be measured by its capacity to deliver relevant records in response to deliberately
articulated queries.
The concern here is not, then, with the uses of classification in information retrieval but with the
broader question of whether the central principle embodied in the practice and theory of classification
and indexing can yield more satisfying design and evaluative criteria for information retrieval

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