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Hi - I'm wondering if she is using a definition of "database" that seems to be common in libraries, that means "a resource on the web that we pay for". D -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alain Borel Sent: Friday, June 03, 2011 10:24 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Precision and Recall Dave Caroline <[log in to unmask]> 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)