Information and time relevance/aboutness

Considering the necessity to search for information and the potential resources that can satisfy the necessity, and its aboutness, Mizzaro suggests that “each relevance can be seen as a point in a fourth-dimensional space, the values of each of the four dimensions being: (i) Surrogate, document, information; (ii) query, request, information need, problem; (iii) topic, task, context, and each combination of them; and (iv) the various time instants from the arising of the problem until its solution” (Mizzaro, p, 812).

The dimension of aboutness (task, topic, and context) is rather incomplete in a sense that aboutness in relation to time could have been included, in addition to including time as the fourth dimension. The difference between time as a fourth dimension and time related to aboutness, is that time aboutness would give us relevance related to the passage of time.

For example, a document might be less relevant today in a certain organizational context compared to the earlier relevance it might have had, resulting from the fact that other documents appearing latter have superceded it; something like the induced difference in relevance judgments as a result of two points in time, and the additional difference in relevance when these two points in time are moved together to another time.

This could be considered different than the fourth dimension where the relation between the need for information, the resource to satisfy the need and its aboutness all three change in the way they are related at different points in time. One could argue however that the time aboutness is part of the context.

Nevertheless, I think time aboutness should be treated separately as is the task, the topics, and the context.

Related:
Information Relevance

Reference:
Mizzaro, S. (1997). Relevance: the whole history. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48 (9), 810-832