Dave Caroline <[email protected]> a écrit :
The questions seem related to search engines or should you be googling for full text indexes or the other more correct name inverted index. Because in the normal scheme of events databases return exactly what you ask for.
One could argue that the same thing happens with search engines. After all, both databases and search engines are deterministic programs that provide a set of records in response to a query.
Precision and recall are not determined by what you ask - what defines them is how relevant the output records are with respect to a real-life question. It isn't tied to a technology. Of course, it can be more or less difficult to translate this question into a query, and the program might be more or less "smart" while processing the query. Both aspects affect precision and recall, in my opinion.
Anybody who ever used a bibliographic database using Google-like queries can testify that a database can have extremely poor precision and recall in some use cases ;-)
Best regards, Alain Borel EPFL Bibliothèque Rolex Learning Center 1015 Lausanne (Switzerland)
