Towards an information logic

• Authors: C. J. van Rijsbergen
• Venue: SIGIR '89 Proceedings of the 12th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
• Year: 1989

'Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge.' (Boole, 1854)Information retrieval based on stored program electronic computers has been an active area of research since the time these machines were invented. It is therefore somewhat surprising that even now no formal computational model for IR exists. There is no well-defined logic to describe information retrieval, and there is no proof or model theory to talk about the truths of IR.This paper argues that much of the research work in the past has been steps in the direction of a logic for IR. These steps have been taken by developing formal models for information retrieval, but to date none of these are complete nor could any claim to be a computational model for IR. To appreciate this development I shall present a picture of IR, describing bits of a puzzle which may fit together to point to a new framework within which a computational model or logic could be described.