Relevantsuse

Relevantsuse is a neologism used in information science and knowledge management to describe the property of information that is both relevant to a user's goal and useful for taking action in a given context. Unlike relevance alone, relevantsuse emphasizes practical utility and task fit, foregrounding how information supports decision making and execution.

Origin and adoption: The term arises in discussions on improving search, recommender systems, and documentation design. It has no universal formal definition and is treated as a framework or heuristic rather than a fixed metric; its usage varies by domain.

Core dimensions: contextual relevance (how well the information matches the user's current task and setting) and pragmatic usefulness (clarity, actionability, completeness, timeliness, credibility). Additional factors include accessibility and user effort required.

Measurement: can be assessed with user studies, task-based evaluations, and metrics such as task success rate, time to complete tasks, perceived usefulness, and satisfaction. Some approaches combine qualitative interviews with quantitative scoring.

Applications: information retrieval, knowledge bases, education, documentation, dashboards, and policy analysis.

Limitations: as a concept, relevantsuse can be subjective and context-dependent; lack of standard definitions may hinder cross-domain comparisons. Related terms include relevance, usefulness, and usability.