Uncertainty and Actor-Oriented Information Retrieval in µ-AKCESS An Approach Based on Fuzzy Set Theory

Summary

This article is concerned with the problem of defining a fuzzy retrieval model dealing with the actors of scientific work appearing in a bibliographic database. For that purpose, a decision model, called AKCESS¹, has been developed which determines the relevance of scientific agents for a certain topic by analyzing the scientific structures in which documents, authors or researchers are embedded in. The system leads to a quantitative description of the importance of a certain scientist for the research field studied. In order to allow an adequate interpretation of such a formal description with respect to the vagueness of the user’s information needs, a fuzzy retrieval model, called µ-AKCESS, is introduced arranging persons in fuzzy relevance classes.