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".
Read more about this topic: Relevance
Famous quotes containing the words library and, library, information and/or science:
“With sighs more lunar than bronchial,
Howbeit eluding fallopian diagnosis,
She simpers into the tribal library and reads
That Keats died of tuberculosis . . .”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)
“Rejecting all organs of information ... but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“But don’t despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)