which information 'relevance' is relevant?

At its basics, relevance is about matching the pertinent thing to an information need. It is established and evaluated by matching the representation of texts and representation of information need (Saracevic, p.6). As the basic and one of the most important concepts in information retrieval (IR) systems, relevance has evolved and in many ways led the evolution in the research, design, and development of IR systems. The concept of relevance has evolved from the system centric approach and into the more user centric approach floating in the discourse of the cognitive viewpoint of information science.

The intuitive understanding of relevance and aboutness has been rather recognized to be very complex, as Mizzaro and Saracevic have shown. In the system centric approach, “Relevance is considered to be a property of the system – it depends on how the system acquires, represents, organizes and matches texts, or in other words on the internal manipulation of the system” (Saracevic, p.6). With the move towards the cognitive viewpoint, research has elaborated on the various relevance attributes and the various manifestations relevance exhibits itself. So, which relevance should IR systems designers, developers and researchers deal with? The paradoxical answer is the relevant relevance at the appropriate level/dimension of manifestation. Based on the intuitive understanding of relevance, Saracevic derives that: “as a cognitive notion relevance involves an interactive, dynamic establishment of a relation by inference, with intentions toward a context” (Saracevic, p.5)

From the above it is evident that context matters. Relevance cannot be addresses without a context especially in relation to the interactive IR systems with the user(s) as the central element affecting multiple manifestation of relevance: “Relevance is a dynamic phenomena: For the same judge, a document may be relevant at a certain point of time and not relevant later, or vice versa” (Mizzaro, p. 814).

If there are multiple manifestations of relevance, is it feasible to identify relevance, a composite one, which perhaps can give us an insight into the relevance as it pertains to a particular situation and task? A challenge like this would perhaps require understanding the relation among the various manifestations of relevance.

Related:
Information Relevance

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

Saracevic, T. (1996). Relevance reconsidered. Information science: Integration in perspectives. Proceedings of the Second Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science. Copenhagen (Denmark), 201-218