The second edition of Heting Chu’s book titled Information Representation & Retrieval (IRR) in the Digital Age is published by Information Today, Inc. early this month. The bibliographic and price details about the book can be found at http://books.infotoday.com/asist/InfoRep.shtml.

This edition features numerous updates and revisions, including coverage of taxonomies, folksonomies, ontologies, social tagging, and next generation OPACs. The chapter on artificial intelligence has been significantly expanded to include a host of related topics such as automatic summarization, question answering, natural language searching, and the semantic web. More specifics about this updated version are detailed in its preface at http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/hchu/Preface-2ndEd.pdf.  

As in the first edition, Chu emphasizes principles and fundamentals. She reviews key concepts and major developmental stages of the field, and then systematically examines information representation methods, IRR languages, retrieval techniques and models, and internet retrieval systems. In addition, she explains the retrieval of multilingual, multimedia, and hyperstructured information and explores the user dimension and evaluation issues.