DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

ABSTRACT

With the large and increasing pool of information (both offline and online) readily available to organizations and institutions, the requirement for a fast and efficient approach of information retrieval from this large collection of information cannot be overemphasized. Information retrieval is the process of obtaining information resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of these resources. It is concerned with all the activities related to the organization of, processing of, and access to information of all forms and format. This project illustrates the design and implementation of an Information Retrieval System and aims at providing a solution of scanning and searching through large collection of documents in the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Benin, particularly in the departmental library. This project aims at providing fast and efficient approach of fetching information in their order of relevance, for students and staff of the department, from the large collection of documents in the department. This project explains the phases and stages required for the design and implementation of an Information Retrieval System. The concept of existing information retrieval models was studied, and the knowledge gained will be used to design and implement the Information Retrieval System for application in the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Benin. This project will efficiently extract, index and search unstructured documents such as Microsoft documents (DOCX etc), Portable document format (PDF), Images (JPEGs, PNG, etc), HTML among others, through repositories upon a user query and catalogue the results in their order of relevance.