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This paper discusses the impact of three selected command language facilities on the man—system interface in relation to operational online information retrieval (IR). The concept of data and information is briefly considered in relation to the cognitive viewpoint and Brookes ‘fundamental equation of information science.’ A cognitive IR model is out‐lined, followed by a discussion of variously experienced searchers' knowledge structures. Recently developed online search facilities such as use of positional operators (free text operations), crossfile searching and term frequency analysis (zooming—as the ES A‐Quest command language calls it) are discussed in relation to the IR process. The cognitive view is applied as the means to describe and emphasise the retrieval possibilities and the state of knowledge involved in the interface processes.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the conceptual issues of information behaviour research by reviewing the approaches to information interaction in the context of information seeking and retrieval (IS&R).

The study uses the conceptual analysis focussing on four pioneering models for interactive IS&R proposed by Belkin, Ingwersen and Ingwersen and Järvelin.

A main characteristic of models for information interaction is the tripartite setting identifying information resources accessible through information systems, intermediary/interface and user. Dialogue is a fundamental constituent of information interaction. Early models proposed by Belkin and Ingwersen focussed on the dialogue occurring in user-intermediary interaction, while more recent frameworks developed by Ingwersen and Järvelin devote more attention to dialogue constitutive of user-information system interaction.

As the study focusses on four models developed within the period of 1984-2005, the findings cannot be generalised to depict the phenomena of information interaction as a whole. Further research is needed to model the specific features of information interaction occurring in the networked information environments in particular.

The study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the ways in which pioneering researchers have conceptualised the phenomena of interaction in the context of IS&R. The findings contribute to the elaboration of the conceptual space of information behaviour research.

The objective of the paper is to amalgamate theories of text retrieval from various research traditions into a cognitive theory for information retrieval interaction. Set in a cognitive framework, the paper outlines the concept of polyrepresentation applied to both the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. The concept seeks to represent the current user's information need, problem state, and domain work task or interest in a structure of causality. Further, it implies that we should apply different methods of representation and a variety of IR techniques of different cognitive and functional origin simultaneously to each semantic full‐text entity in the information space. The cognitive differences imply that by applying cognitive overlaps of information objects, originating from different interpretations of such objects through time and by type, the degree of uncertainty inherent in IR is decreased. Polyrepresentation and the use of cognitive overlaps are associated with, but not identical to, data fusion in IR. By explicitly incorporating all the cognitive structures participating in the interactive communication processes during IR, the cognitive theory provides a comprehensive view of these processes. It encompasses the ad hoc theories of text retrieval and IR techniques hitherto developed in mainstream retrieval research. It has elements in common with van Rijsbergen and Lalmas' logical uncertainty theory and may be regarded as compatible with that conception of IR. Epistemologically speaking, the theory views IR interaction as processes of cognition, potentially occurring in all the information processing components of IR, that may be applied, in particular, to the user in a situational context. The theory draws upon basic empirical results from information seeking investigations in the operational online environment, and from mainstream IR research on partial matching techniques and relevance feedback. By viewing users, source systems, intermediary mechanisms and information in a global context, the cognitive perspective attempts a comprehensive understanding of essential IR phenomena and concepts, such as the nature of information needs, cognitive inconsistency and retrieval overlaps, logical uncertainty, the concept of ‘document’, relevance measures and experimental settings. An inescapable consequence of this approach is to rely more on sociological and psychological investigative methods when evaluating systems and to view relevance in IR as situational, relative, partial, differentiated and non‐linear. The lack of consistency among authors, indexers, evaluators or users is of an identical cognitive nature. It is unavoidable, and indeed favourable to IR. In particular, for full‐text retrieval, alternative semantic entities, including Salton et al.'s ‘passage retrieval’, are proposed to replace the traditional document record as the basic retrieval entity. These empirically observed phenomena of inconsistency and of semantic entities and values associated with data interpretation support strongly a cognitive approach to IR and the logical use of polyrepresentation, cognitive overlaps, and both data fusion and data diffusion.

This article presents a novel user‐oriented interface for generalised informetric analysis and demonstrates how informetric calculations can easily and declaratively be specified through advanced data modelling techniques. The interface is declarative and at a high level. Therefore it is easy to use, flexible and extensible. It enables end users to perform basic informetric ad hoc calculations easily and often with much less effort than in contemporary online retrieval systems. It also provides several fruitful generalisations of typical informetric measurements like impact factors. These are based on substituting traditional foci of analysis, for instance journals, by other object types, such as authors, organisations or countries. In the interface, bibliographic data are modelled as complex objects (non‐first normal form relations) and terminological and citation networks involving transitive relationships are modelled as binary relations for deductive processing. The interface is flexible, because it makes it easy to switch focus between various object types for informetric calculations, e.g. from authors to institutions. Moreover, it is demonstrated that all informetric data can easily be broken down by criteria that foster advanced analysis, e.g. by years or content‐bearing attributes. Such modelling allows flexible data aggregation along many dimensions. These salient features emerge from the query interface‘s general data restructuring and aggregation capabilities combined with transitive processing capabilities. The features are illustrated by means of sample queries and results in the article.

The paper describes the ideas and assumptions underlying the development of a new method for the evaluation and testing of interactive information retrieval (IR) systems, and reports on the initial tests of the proposed method. The method is designed to collect different types of empirical data, i.e. cognitive data as well as traditional systems performance data. The method is based on the novel concept of a ‘simulated work task situation’ or scenario and the involvement of real end users. The method is also based on a mixture of simulated and real information needs, and involves a group of test persons as well as assessments made by individual panel members. The relevance assessments are made with reference to the concepts of topical as well as situational relevance. The method takes into account the dynamic nature of information needs which are assumed to develop over time for the same user, a variability which is presumed to be strongly connected to the processes of relevance assessment.

This case study reports the investigations into the feasibility and reliability of calculating impact factors for web sites, called Web Impact Factors (Web‐IF). The study analyses a selection of seven small and medium scale national and four large web domains as well as six institutional web sites over a series of snapshots taken of the web during a month. The data isolation and calculation methods are described and the tests discussed. The results thus far demonstrate that Web‐IFs are calculable with high confidence for national and sector domains whilst institutional Web‐IFs should be approached with caution. The data isolation method makes use of sets of inverted but logically identical Boolean set operations and their mean values in order to generate the impact factors associated with internal‐ (self‐) link web pages and external‐link web pages. Their logical sum is assumed to constitute the workable frequency of web pages linking up to the web location in question. The logical operations are necessary to overcome the variations in retrieval outcome produced by the AltaVista search engine.

Sir, We write to record our debt, and that of our colleagues, to one of the founding fathers of information retrieval, Gerard (Gerry) Salton, who died on 28th August 1995 in Ithaca, ny at the age of 68. Information retrieval was established as a new academic discipline by a small number of pioneers, Gerry among them, who recognised the need for, and the research challenges presented by, the automated indexing, storage and retrieval of text documents. He brought academic rigour and scholarship to establishing the foundations of this discipline, and we acknowledge his influential contributions to the theory, experimental methods, and practice of information retrieval.