Information Retrieval-from Academic Research to Practical Applications

Information Retrieval (IR) as a discipline did not originate from an urgent need of professionals to master today's information explosion. Nor is the content of the relatively small test collections employed in the past by IR research in line with the kind of information professionals are faced with at the present time. Only recently IR researchers have started to study real-life problems and have realized that the information which enterprises invariably encounter is highly unstructured, heterogenous, multiand hypermedia, and of varying quality. Because of the requirements imposed by today's professional life, Information Technology (IT) software becomes increasingly complex. We argue in this paper that it is an advantage to use a framework approach—an advantage not only for operational IR applications but also for research purposes, particularly for the evaluation of indexing and retrieval techniques. The IR framework FIRE is being developed along these lines. The rationale for developing FIRE is discussed, and the structure and some of the basic properties of FIRE are explained. 1 Information and Information Retrieval It is not the aim of this article to repeat the technological achievements of the past decades nor to predict what technology will bring us in the decades to come. Likewise, the often cited information explosion is a well-known fact and its effect on the life of many professionals should not be reiterated either. Rather, we want to summarize what Information Retrieval (IR) research has accomplished in the past and to what effect the achievements of IR research have been put into practice in real-life environments. Hence, we will reflect upon different kinds of information, upon the value and price of information, and upon the expectations of practitioners concerning IR research results. It is often argued that information in the past used to consist of text only and, because of this single medium, searching for information was easier. There have, of course, always been other types of information, like speech, gesture, images, etc., but indeed text was the only information type that was stored on a medium (e.g. on paper) and was therefore searchable. With the advent of new recording equipment many other kinds of information started to grow into entire collections. When a need for searching mechanisms emerged,