The annual Information Retrieval Facility Symposium (IRFS 2008) 'Research meets Practice' was recently conducted in Vienna, Austria. The IRFS seeks to promote, facilitate and enable Information Retrieval (IR) research in close cooperation with experts from the Intellectual Property (IP) community and to offer an environment for large scale experimentation. In 2007, more than 100 attendees contributed to building significant bridges between the practical world of professional patent searching and the world of IR research.
Building on the IRFS2007, world leading information retrieval scientists and IP information specialists from all industries once again gathered to share their experiences and emphasised on the need to work together towards solutions. The main themes of this year's speeches were multilingual retrieval, annotations and ontology, retrieval in non-textual documents and the improvement of user interfaces. Latest scientific projects from the fields of semantic and linguistic retrieval, text mining, automated quality control and machine translation were presented for the first time.
The main sponsor of the event, the Austrian company, Matrixware, presented its patent database, 'Alexandria', and its retrieval and development environment, 'Leonardo'.
All speeches can be downloaded via LiveStream under www.ir-facility/livestream.
