Information Retrieval in Virtual Universities

Abstract

Information retrieval in the context of virtual universities deals with the representation, organization and access to learning objects. The representation and organization of learning objects should provide the learner with an easy access to the learning objects. In this paper, we give an overview of the ONES system and analyze the relevance of two information retrieval models for virtual universities. We argue that keywords-based search (i.e., the Boolean model), though well suited for Web searches, is overly coarse for virtual universities. Instead, the vector model, on which our implemented search engine also is based, seems to be more appropriate, as it provides similarity measure (i.e., the learning object having the best match is presented first). We also compare the performance of four algorithms for computing the similarities (matching).