Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) is the discipline concerned with optimizing the storage, searching, and retrieval of documents, particularly textual documents from databases and the Web. Historically it has been an interdisciplinary blend of the computer science, library science, linguistics and mathematics fields. More recently there has been an emphasis on it usage in biology, health care and medicine and it is considered a key subdomain of Biomedical Informatics.

Work in the 1960’s developed research test systems and evaluation methodologies though large collections or databases were lacking. The exponential growth of computing power in the 1970’s and 1980’s supported research and large scale testing of new techniques for content indexing and query optimizations. Access to medical databases was largely done through trained librarians or other intermediaries. These databases were primarily “bibliographic”; that is listings of articles, books or other materials held in a library. The output of a query was a list of relevant materials. The 1990’s explosion in network technologies allowed more direct access to databases and research intensified in interface and query optimizations along with research using large “textual” databases. The emergence of the Web brought information querying and retrieval to the masses.

This discipline is at the forefront of modern health care research. Its techniques are central to the emergence of the sciences of genomics and proteomics that require huge databases and abilities to query and extract information and relationships. The Web has provided a new, almost infinitely large test bed for research and the development and rollout of electronic health records will depend on advances in this area.

Submitted by Jeff Emch