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Four years ago, when the first edition of this book was written, information retrieval was beginning to crystallize out as a unified discipline. The process has gone further today. Several other books... have also offered a general survey, although each has contributed its own special emphasis. Many conferences on the subject have been held, and a constant stream of new articles has appeared, both in documentation journals and in those in the data processing field.
Information retrieval is now recognized as a discipline, and further advances in theory are being made, What I described in the first edition as the key operation in retrieval — the subject description of documents — is being explored theoretically and experimentally, although we are still a long way from reducing this operation to rule . There has been less new work on the design of descriptor languages, although ideas on the display of descriptor relations through thesauri and 'semantic maps' have been developed . Access to files has been examined, particularly by those experienced in data processing. (en) |
