This book presents a wide-spectrum illustration of what research in Information Retrieval
has produced or will produce in the next years. The book content includes
chapters on Aggregated Search, Digital Advertising, Digital Libraries, Discovery of
Spam and Opinions in the Web, Evaluation, Information Retrieval in Context, Multimedia
Resource Discovery, Quantum Mechanics applied to Information Retrieval,
Scalability Challenges inWeb Search Engines, and Users in Interactive Information
Retrieval Evaluation. Every chapter is authored by well-known researchers, with an
integrated bibliography and subject index. In the following paragraphs we describe
briefly the content of each of these chapters, which are sorted in lexicographical
order by first author.
We start with a chapter on Digital Libraries by Maristella Agosti from the University
of Padova, Italy. Here she gives some historical background to then introduce
the main concepts of present digital library systems. After that, the chapter covers
usability, interoperability and evaluation issues.
The second chapter is Scalability Challenges in Web Search Engines by Berkant
Barla Cambazoglu and Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo! Research Barcelona,
Spain. This chapters looks at current search engine architectures, from a single
search server to search clusters. The chapter ends in a hypothetical geographically
distributed multi-site search system, focusing on scalability issues and current open
problems.
Chapter three is entitled Spam, Opinions, and other Relationships: Towards a
Comprehensive View of the Web by Bettina Berendt from Leuven University, Belgium.
This chapter proposes an integrating model of learning cycles involving data,
information and knowledge, which includes Information Retrieval and Knowledge
Discovery in the Web as particular cases. This is illustrated by applying the model
to spam detection, opinion mining and relation mining.
The fourth chapter is The User in Interactive Information Retrieval Evaluation
by Peter Ingwersen from the Royal School of Library and Information Science,
Denmark. This chapter explores interactive information retrieval by using
a laboratory research framework for IR. This involves the definition of request
types, ultra-light experiments, interactive-light studies and naturalistic field investigations.
