Exemplary documents: a foundation for information retrieval design

Documents are generally represented for retrieval by either extracting index terms from them or by creating and selecting from an external set of candidate terms. There are many procedures for doing this, but while work continues along these dimensions, there have been relatively few attempts to change this basic process. Of particular importance is the creation of indexing schemes for retrieval systems in nonlibrary contexts. Here, the cost of developing an indexing scheme independent of the documents to be retrieved is often considered too high to implement. As a result, simple full-text retrieval or, to a lesser extent, automatic extractive or associative indexing methods are the predominant methods used in nonlibrary contexts. This paper suggests an alternative document representation method based on what we call exemplary documents. Exemplary documents are those documents that describe or exhibit the intellectual structure of a particular field of interest. In so doing, they provide both an indexing vocabulary for that area and, more importantly, a narrative context in which the indexing terms have a clearer meaning. Further, it is much easier to develop an indexing scheme by using exemplary documents than it is to do so from scratch.