Information Retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents and for information within documents, as well as searching relational databases and the World Wide Web. It has many practical implications for the industry: Beyond the development of search engines and optimization of digital libraries, IR applications encompass automatic classification and annotation, discovery, alerting and routing systems. They reach out to automatic translation engines, providing companies with business development tools of immediate strategic relevance.
 

IR for Industry

The most obvious beneficiaries of efficient information retrieval are companies that generate large amounts of data - from internal memos and email correspondence to customers statistics and market analyses - or work with complex data like chemical process descriptions or mechanical drawings, and industries with high innovation pressure and high R&D activity like the manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries as well as providers of data products and search tools. Some examples of IR use case scenarios which meet frequent business needs are described here.