Objectives

From the Course Objectives a key point is to prepare students to: read and understand research contributions in the broad area of information storage and retrieval. Toward that end, the article by Salton summarizes a number of findings and highlights some important topics debated by researchers.

Another objective is to: critique, contrast, compare, and evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and utility of commercially available and research prototype systems for IS&R. Much of that is covered in the Salton article, where the commercially available Stairs system is discussed, and where experimental systems used by others are involved in the other studies. All of this discussion is placed in a organizing framework in Chapter 1 of the text. Also, the exercise provides exposure to another commercially available retrieval system, illustrating how very short data records are processed with it. That exercise also satisfies part of the objective: effectively use ... search ... access systems - for common tasks.

In summary, this Unit has the following objectives, for students to be able to:

1. define and explain important terms;

2. carry out (Boolean) word searches with VTLS;

3. explain what is wrong with the conclusions stated by Blair and Maron [1];

4. explain the basic concepts, data structures, operations, and algorithms that serve as background for most work in IS&R;

5. draw a functional diagram for a state-of-the-art retrieval system; and

6. distinguish IS&Rsystems from typical DBMS and AI systems.