Information Retrieval

Information retrieval (IR) is concerned with the structure, analysis, organization, storage, searching, and dissemination of information. An IR system is designed to make a given stored collection of information items available to a user population. At one time that information consisted of stored bibliographic items, such as online catalogs of books in a library or abstracts of scientific articles. However, in today's world, the information is more likely to be full-length documents, either stored in a single location, such as newspaper archives, or available in a widely distributed form, such as the World Wide Web (WWW).