Dear MS CS student

Please be aware of the course below that is being offered in Fall 2010 
on Wed from 4:30 to 7:10pm. This course is of interest to MS CS students 
who wish to learn about information retrieval:

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INFS 623 Classical and Web Information Retrieval.

The need to locate information efficiently on the World-Wide-Web has 
moved the traditional field of information retrieval (previously 
confined to applications such as document retrieval from library 
collections) to the center of the stage. This is demonstrated by the 
simple fact that these days nearly everyone uses Internet search engines 
and is thus familiar with previously obscure IR concepts such keywords, 
relevance, ranking, search refinement, etc. In addition, market 
capitalization of information retrieval now exceeds that of databases!

This graduate course is an introduction to the area of information 
retrieval. This course has been revised and now covers principles of 
both Classical information retrieval (e.g., the Boolean and vector space 
model, document indexing, ranking, effectiveness measurement) and Modern 
information retrieval (e.g., hypertext documents, Internet search 
engines, Web crawling, link analysis).

Roughly speaking, the subject of INFS-623 is complemetary to the subject 
of a database management course, such as 
<http://ise.gmu.edu/~ami/teaching/infs614/infs614.html>INFS-614: 
Database Management or 
<http://ise.gmu.edu/~ami/teaching/infs760/infs760.html>INFS-760: 
Advanced Database Management. Whereas database management is concerned 
mainly with storage and retrieval of structured information, information 
retrieval is concerned mainly with storage and retrieval of unstructured 
information, such as documents and World-Wide-Web pages.
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