Information Retrieval Facility - Scientific Goals

Scientific Goals

• Modelling innovative and specialised information retrieval systems for global patent document collections.
• Investigating and developing an adequate technical infrastructure that allows interactive experimentation with formal, mathematical retrieval concepts for very large-scale document collections.<
• Studying the usability of multi modal user-interfaces to very large-scale information retrieval systems.
• Integrating real users with actual information needs into the research process of modelling information retrieval systems to allow accurate performance evaluation.
• Ability to create different views of patent data depending on the focus of the information need.
• Defining standardised methods for benchmarking the information retrieval process in patent document collections.
• Ability to handle text and non-text parts of a patent in a coherent manner.
• Designing, experimenting and evaluating search engines able to retrieve structured and semi-structured documents in very large-scale patent collections.
• Integrating the temporal dimension of patent documents in retrieval strategies.
• Improving effectiveness and precision of patent retrieval, based on ontologies and natural-language understanding techniques.
• Refining IR methods that allow unstructured querying by exploiting available structure within the patent documents.
• Formal (mathematical) identification and specification of relevant business information needs in the field of intellectual property information.
• Investigating efficient scaling mechanisms for information retrieval taking into account the characteristics of patent data.
• Investigating and experimenting with computing architectures for very high-capacity information management.
• Establishing an open eScience platform that enables a standardised and easy way of creating and performing IR experiments on a common research infrastructure.
• Discovering and investigating novel use cases and business applications deriving from intellectual property information.
• Enabling the formal information retrieval, natural language and semantic processing research to grow into the field of applied sciences in the global, industrial context.
• Development and integration of different information access methods.
• Research on effective methods for interactive information retrieval.