Organization responsible: TNO

People involved:

• Ronald Poell, TNO

Project description:

An exhaustive literature study showed that the relevance theme is a subject of concern within the domain of “Information Extraction” and in particular in “Information retrieval” (IR). No information has been found about the behavior of the relevance of information over time. The context of information retrieval (reason or purpose) of the retrieval is the only factor interfering for the determination of the relevance.

One of the research topics was the investigation of relevance of information independent of all the possible IR contexts (without context). The research showed clearly that the meaning of without context must in fact be interpreted as having a global context (the sum of all possible contexts). Relevance and associated relevance decay models are always related to one or more contexts and can not be defined without any context at all.

All the kinds of information in the existing semantic network (1.3 million nodes, 4 million statements and 8 million attributes) have been investigated in a perspective of relevance without a context. None of the kinds of information showed neither non ambiguous relevance, nor possible relevance decay over time.

As a direct consequence no classification could be found to characterize information in terms of behavior of its relevance over time.

Publications: