Information Retrieval (IR) on theWorld WideWeb functions very effectively and efficiently. These search tools are specifically designed as multi-purpose tools, applicable in as wide an array of situations as possible. Nevertheless, all information is not equal. There are areas for which these tools are conceived too broadly to be useful: health or biomedical information, intellectual property information, social science publications, blogs, press photographs, etc. A search in one of these domains is called a domain-specific search. Such a search is specific in terms of the collection of documents indexed, search refinements arising from the domain characteristics, domain coverage specificity, types of multimodal data (e.g. images, chemical formulae) present in the documents, and the end users and their tasks. Even though many domains have similar characteristics and challenges, there is as yet no general framework for developing domain-specific search solutions, and no way of characterising a domain to allow the best approach or tools to be chosen.
ADmIRE will contribute to the following areas of IR: 1. Domain-specific IR methodologies and 2. IR evaluation. For domain-specific IR, we will develop a framework consisting of a classification scheme for domain-specific problems and a protocol giving the optimal evidence-based approach to solving the problem based on the characterisation. The latter will be obtained by doing systematic reviews of IR papers. In fact, the creation of systematic reviews and hence of guidelines for domain-specific IR is an example of a (rather difficult) domain-specific search problem. We will use this problem as the central scenario for ADmIRE, working on the research and development to create semi-automated tools for IR researchers to create systematic reviews effectively. This scenario therefore simultaneously serves as a model of a domain-specific problem and as a means to find the evidence-based solution.
For IR evaluation, ADmIRE will develop guidelines for future IR evaluation campaigns and publications to allow easier and more effective use of the evaluation results to guide decisions in domain-specific search system design, and develop a framework for component-based evaluation based on the workflow paradigm. The framework will being IR evaluation closer to the e-Science paradigm, allowing better sharing of experimental setups between researchers, and more flexibility in performing IR experiments with multiple configurations of components.
IR (and potentially other empirically-based areas of computer science) has the advantage of already starting from a position where experimental studies are the cornerstone of the domain. ADmIRE will put together all of this experimental information, organizing it to make use of it in a specific domain, which is a very challenging and yet absolutely necessary task for the development of the field of IR.
