Indekseringskvalitet

Indekseringskvalitet refers to the effectiveness and reliability of the indexing process used to describe information objects so that they can be retrieved efficiently. It is a concept used in libraries, digital repositories, and search engines to measure how well metadata and indexing terms support discovery. High indekseringskvalitet improves precision and recall in search results and reduces user effort.

Key aspects include coverage (how much of the corpus is indexed and with appropriate terms), accuracy (correct assignment of terms to items), consistency (uniform use of terms across items), timeliness (how quickly new content is indexed), and granularity (level of detail of indexing). Use of controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, and thesauri helps maintain quality and supports multilingual and cross-domain retrieval.

Evaluation methods: sampling-based manual reviews, automatic quality checks, and user feedback. Metrics such as precision, recall, and F1-score can be adapted for indexing quality; inter-indexer reliability (e.g., Cohen's kappa) measures consistency among indexers; error rates and coverage metrics quantify overall quality.

Improvement strategies include developing clear indexing guidelines, training with examples, implementing quality assurance workflows, and using automated tagging with human oversight. Techniques such as post-coordination and ontology-based indexing can increase flexibility; regular audits and user-driven updates help maintain relevance.

Challenges include polysemy and synonymy, evolving domain vocabularies, multilingual indexing, resource constraints, and balancing granularity with retrieval performance.