Relevance: The whole history

Abstract

Relevance is a fundamental, though not completely understood, concept for documentation, information scithere was little agreement as to the exact nature of releence, and information retrieval. This article presents the vance and even less that it could be operationalized in history of relevance through an exhaustive review of the systems or for the evaluation of systems. . . . this lack literature. Such history being very complex (about 160 of agreement continues to an extent at the present. papers are discussed), it is not simple to describe it in (Froehlich, 1994, p. 124) a comprehensible way. Thus, first of all a framework for establishing a common ground is defined, and then the This is an article on the history of relevance in the history itself is illustrated via the presentation in chronofields of documentation, information science and informalogical order of the papers on relevance. The history is divided into three periods (''Before 1958,'' ''1959-1976,'' tion retrieval. Why to write an article on the history of and ''1977-present'') and, inside each period, the papers relevance? How to write it? The first question is answered on relevance are analyzed under seven different aspects by the following points:(methodological foundations, different kinds of relevance, beyond-topical criteria adopted by users, modes j The above three citations witness that relevance is one for expression of the relevance judgment, dynamic naof the central concepts, if not the central concept, for ture of relevance, types of document representation, and documentation, information science, and information agreement among different judges).retrieval (IR in the following): In the first citation, Saracevic maintains that relevance is the reason for the birth of information science and emphasizes its impor-

Understanding epistemic relevance

“…The reason behind our decision is that the notion of relevance has never been defined precisely in IR. Although there has been a large number of attempts towards a definition of the concept of relevance (Saracevic [1970]; Cooper [1971]; Mizzaro [1996]), there has never been agreement about a unique and precise definition. A treatment of the concept of relevance is outside the scope of this paper and we will not attempt to formulate a new definition or even accept a particular already existing one.…”

A study on the relevance criteria for medical images

“…She named these three approaches as objective, subjective and situational views, respectively. Mizzaro (1997) analysed 157 papers published since 1959 and classified them within three periods : "before 1958", "1959-1976" and "1977-present". He analysed papers within each time period regarding the following aspects: methodological foundation, kinds of relevance, beyondtopical criteria adopted by users, modes for expressing the relevance judgment, dynamic nature of relevance, type of document representation, and agreement among different judges.…”

“…He analysed papers within each time period regarding the following aspects: methodological foundation, kinds of relevance, beyondtopical criteria adopted by users, modes for expressing the relevance judgment, dynamic nature of relevance, type of document representation, and agreement among different judges. Mizzaro (1997) concluded that the focus of papers published in the "1959-1976" period had been on relevance inherent in the document and query (topical relevance). However in the "1977-present" period, researchers have attempted to understand, formalize, and measure a more subjective, dynamic and multidimensional relevance judgment (situational relevance).…”

“…They found that typicality, emotion and aesthetic appearance were the three most important criteria, applied across all three tasks, where typicality was deemed the most important criterion for all three tasks (according to the authors, typicality is a criterion that can exhibit universal representation of an object in a photo). Lancaster (1979); Barry (1994); Barry and Schamber (1998);Mizzaro (1997); Choi and Rasmussen (2002) and Tang and Solomon (1998) reported that the end-users of IR systems decided the relevance of retrieved documents based upon their particular information needs.…”

“…Similarly, although relevance studies have explored criteria elicited from the users of document retrieval systems (see, e.g. (Saracevic, 1996;Mizzaro, 1997)), the understanding of such criteria particularly for medical images, is limited. Previous work within the large body of user-oriented relevance has not addressed how health care professionals perform information seeking for medical images.…”