[week 1] Muddiest Points

After reviewing my notes and checking the video of the class (really good!, I didn't know before about Panopto), here are my muddiest points of the week 1:

1. We discussed various definitions during the class such as Information, the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom) hierarchy and, of course, the definition of Information Retrieval. The definition selected was one from Nicholas J. Belkin (1980):

Information retrieval is a problem-oriented discipline, concerned with the problem of the effective and efficient transfer of desired information between human generator and human user.

I can infer that what is more known as "user needs" in IR is described here as "desired information", but this definition tends to put more emphasis on the "effective and efficient transfer" of information than on the different kinds of "user needs". I wonder how has changed the focus inside the IR research along the years, I mean, in which parts of the IR field the researchers have been more concentrated before and after the creation of the World Wide Web.

2. We also saw some different approaches to realize how fast is growing the generation of information, comparing the size in TB of Lexis-Nexis and DIALOG with the library of Congress, a graph showing the host count year by year on the Internet and the Storage Information in different media (digital devices, books, etc.) Anyway, I wonder what is the methodology to obtain the 5,187,130 TB of data recorded in Magnetic devices in 2002, as described by Lyman and Varian of UC Berkeley.

3. When looking at the IR problem just from the user perspective, what we see is his need of information, which can be classified as Retrospective and Prospective. Are there other classifications of "user needs" that can influence different paradigms or algorithms of Information Retrieval?

4. Finally, I just would like to point that within the types of document representation mentioned in class (Bibliographic, Full-text and Directory), I feel that this classification is a little strange. My sensation is that "Directory" is just part of the "Bibliographic" representation... one the "metadata" fields of a document represented in the Bibliographically can be the categories from a "Directory category path".