information retrieval

systematic recovery of data from the memory bank of a computer

Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describe documents, or searching within databases, whether relational stand-alone databases or hypertextually-networked databases such as the World Wide Web. There is a common confusion, however, between data retrieval, document retrieval, information retrieval, and text retrieval, and each of these has its own bodies of literature, theory, praxis and technologies. IR is interdisciplinary, based on computer science, mathematics, library science, information science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, statistics and physics.
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