Managing Volume in Discovery Systems

• Main Author: Tay, Aaron
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: web scale discovery; library search; metadata; relevancy; Cataloging and Metadata; Library and Information Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/library_research/65; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=library_research
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The well-established measures of recall and precision are becoming increasingly relevant in WSD systems. Given the way that most people search, which is the simple keyword box that searches all text anywhere in the record, WSD systems will lead to increasingly large recall as we provide access to more linked items. Do we need to be careful about the sheer volume of items to which we can provide access via WSD systems? Do we want these systems to become another Google, where precision of results is not always as accurate as we would like? Are we too obsessed with the notion of providing access to everything at the expense of the quality of the results?