Relevance - Library and Information Science

Library and Information Science

This field has considered when documents (or document representations) retrieved from databases are relevant or non-relevant. Given a conception of relevance, two measures have been applied: Precision and recall:

Recall = a : (a + c) X 100%, where a = number of retrieved, relevant documents, c = number of non-retrieved, relevant documents (sometimes termed "silence"). Recall is thus an expression of how exhaustive a search for documents is.

Precision = a : (a + b) X 100%, where a = number of retrieved, relevant documents, b = number of retrieved, non-relevant documents (often termed "noise").

Precision is thus an a measure of the amount of noise in document-retrieval.

Relevance itself has in the literature often been based on what is termed "the system's view" and "the user's view". Hjørland (2010) criticize these two views and defends a "subject knowledge view of relevance".