IR is a relative field of db.

“IR is concerned with the representation, storage, organization of, and access to information items”

• Focus on automatic processing (indexing, clustering, search) of unstructured data (text, images, audio, ...)

• Subfield of Computer Science, but with roots in Library Science, Information Science, and Linguistics

• Applications:

  • searching in a library catalog

  • categorizing a collection of medical (or other topics) articles by area

  • web search engines