Information overload - an IR problem?

Abstract

Information overload over the World-Wide Web (WWW) is a well recognised problem. Research to sub- due this problem and extract maximum benefit from the Internet is still in its infancy. With huge amounts of information connected to the Internet, efficient and effective discovery of resource and knowledge has become an imminent research issue. A vast array of networks services is growing up around the Internet and massive amounts of information is added everyday. Despite the potential benefits of existing indexing, retrieving and searching techniques in assisting users in the browsing process, little has been done to ensure that the information presented is of a high recall and precision standard. Therefore, search for a specific information on this massive and exploding information resource base becomes highly critical. In this paper we discuss the issues involved in resolving the information overload over the WWW and argue that this is solely an in- formation retrieval problem. As a contribution to the field we propose a general architecture to subdue information overload and describe how this architecture has been instantiated in a functional system we developed