On queries and other messages

                                                          Stephen Robertson
                                                     Microsoft Research Cambridge
                                                         7 J J Thomson Avenue
                                                        CB3 0FB Cambridge, UK
                                                          ser@microsoft.com


ABSTRACT                                                                  for both theory and experimentation in the field. The sec-
There are three parts to this talk – related in rather tangen-            ond makes use of some ideas from general systems theory
tial ways. First, I will give a recap of an argument developed            and the notion of open systems, and applies these ideas to
in a couple of earlier talks – at IIiX in 2008 and at the SIGIR           information retrieval and the task context of search. The
evaluation workshop in 2009. The gist of the argument is                  third discusses the status of queries in the current search
about thinking about IR as a science, and the consequences                world, and suggests two new ways to think about queries.




Appears in the Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Contex-
tual Information Access, Seeking and Retrieval Evaluation (CIRSE 2010),
March 28, 2010, Milton Keynes, UK.
http://www.irit.fr/CIRSE/
Copyright owned by the authors.