A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Database Selection in Networked IR

摘要

In networked IR, a client submits a query to a broker, which is in contact with a large number of databases. In order to yield a maximum number of documents at minimum cost, the broker has to make estimates about the retrieval cost of each database, and then decide for each database whether or not to use it for the current query, and if, how many documents to retrieve from it. For this purpose, we develop a general decision-theoretic model and discuss different cost structures.