Cooperative Information Retrieval enhanced by formal concept analysis

Along with the growth of the World Wide Web, information retrieval systems gain importance since they are often the only way to find the few documents actually relevant to a specific question in the vast quantities of text available. Moreover, with the advent of the Web along with the unprecedented amount of information available in electronic format and its distributed structure, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is more useful and practical than ever, because this technology addresses important limitations of the systems that currently support users in their quest for information. Over the last few years, the range of functionality has been expanded to include new tasks such as data reduction and collaborative (or cooperative) information retrieval. In fact, due to the huge quantity of available information and its distributed structure, it is necessary to abstract it and eliminate the redundancy data. In this context, a method for data reduction based on the formal concept analysis is proposed in [16,17]. At the same time, new IR domains have been investigated including different types of information (email messages, web documents,..). Thus, there is nowadays a much better awareness of the strengths and limitations of this technique for organising and searching distributed information. We are interested by searching in distributed information.