Dave Caroline <dave.thearchivist_at_GMAIL.COM> a écrit :
> The questions seem related to search engines or should you be googling for
> full text indexes or the other more correct name inverted index.
> Because in the normal scheme of events databases return exactly what
> you ask for.
One could argue that the same thing happens with search engines. After
all, both databases and search engines are deterministic programs that
provide a set of records in response to a query.
Precision and recall are not determined by what you ask - what defines
them is how relevant the output records are with respect to a
real-life question. It isn't tied to a technology. Of course, it can
be more or less difficult to translate this question into a query, and
the program might be more or less "smart" while processing the query.
Both aspects affect precision and recall, in my opinion.
Anybody who ever used a bibliographic database using Google-like
queries can testify that a database can have extremely poor precision
and recall in some use cases ;-)
Best regards,
Alain Borel
EPFL Bibliothèque
Rolex Learning Center
1015 Lausanne (Switzerland)
Received on Fri Jun 03 2011 - 13:25:41 EDT