IR-BASE: An Integrated Framework for the Research and Teaching of Information Retrieval Technologies
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- TL;DR
- With the rapid growth of digital storage technologies, Information Retrieval (IR) has become increasingly important for both academia and industry.
- Problem
- Despite this growth, very few environments exist that can simultaneously provide useful IR services and serve as a workbench for designing, implementing, and researching new IR solutions.
- Method
- We propose IR-BASE, an object-oriented framework for integrating components, documentation, and services to enable the rapid development of research and teaching prototypes.
- Results
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Contributions
- IR-BASE provides a skeleton of base classes for new IR components, interoperability guidelines, and a component pool where users can find and contribute implementations.
- Limitations
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Takeaways
- IR-BASE helps researchers and professionals rapidly prototype new ideas, while offering teachers and students an easily configurable and modifiable set of components for learning and experimenting with IR algorithms.
- Applications
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Topics
- Information Retrieval, object-oriented frameworks, prototyping, education, research tools
- For industry
- Information retrieval and search technologies.
- Why it matters
- Facilitates rapid prototyping and experimentation for both education and research in Information Retrieval.
Abstract
Due to the rapid growth in digital storage technologies, Information Retrieval (IR) has gained a significant importance, both for academia and for the industry. However, very few proposals have been made for the creation of an environment capable of both providing useful IR services and acting as a workbench for the design, implementation, and research of new IR solutions. In this work, we propose IR-BASE, a basic object oriented framework for the integration of components, documentation and services, focused on the rapid development of prototypes for research and teaching. At its core, IRBASE consists of a set of base classes that provide a skeleton to create new IR components, a set of guidelines to ensure that the developed components are fully interoperable, and a component pool, where IR-BASE users can find implementations of all kinds of functionalities needed to build a full IR system, and to which IR-BASE users can contribute with their own implementations. IR-BASE is of interest not only to IR researchers and professionals, who want to rapidly develop prototypes to test new ideas, but also to teachers and students, who will have an easily configurable, modifiable and extendible set of components to act has a basis for learning, building and experimenting with current IR algorithms.