An information retrieval query language is a query language used to make queries into database, where the semantics of the query are defined not by a precise rendering of a formal syntax, but by an interpretation of the most suitable results of the query.
Of importance in IR query languages is weighting and ranking, "relevance-orientation", semantic relativism and logic-based probabilism.
An example of an IR query language is Contextual Query Language (CQL), a formal language for representing queries to Information Retrieval systems such as web indexes, bibliographic catalogs and museum collection information.
Famous quotes containing the words information, query and/or language:
“I believe it has been said that one copy of The Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.”
—Richard Cobden (1804–1865)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)