Evaluating Data Informativeness and Information Usefulness to Address the User's Information Needs

Assessing the informativeness of data and the usefulness of information are relevant problems for user-oriented information systems. Currently, there are various approaches to solve these problems. This paper examines the possibility of applying quantitative approaches to assess the informativeness of data and usefulness of information. The paper analyses syntactic, semantic and pragmatic approaches to meet the information needs of the user. The analysis shows that the methods for estimating the quantity of information, which belong to the syntactic approach, cannot be effectively applied to assess the informativeness of data and the usefulness of information. These methods can only be used as auxiliary methods. The methods that belong to the semantic and pragmatic approach assess the meaning of information messages and therefore can be effectively used in user-centred information systems. It is noted that usefulness is a subjective characteristic of information and depends on the knowledge the user already possesses. The user's knowledge is described using a thesaurus. Therefore, the most promising methods for assessing the level of satisfaction of the user's information needs, are methods that allow taking into account the user's thesaurus.