Retrieving information from large collections, especially from the World Wide Web, has become an integral part of information systems for personal and business purposes. The need to organize large amounts of information for effective retrieval existed long before the World Wide Web and even before computers. Traditional libraries were the cradle of many techniques for effectively organizing and retrieving information. With the advent of computers, our methods of storing, accessing and searching for information were redefined, and a new field of research emerged - information retrieval. The diversity of information on the World Wide Web brought with it new search tasks that triggered the evolution of traditional and the development of new information retrieval technologies. This course introduces the main concepts and technologies of both traditional information retrieval and information retrieval on the Web.

The course includes the following topics

• Basics of data, information
• Semantic web technologies
• Semantic text analysis
• Visualization and exploration of results
• Recommendation systems