ABSTRACT
Information retrieval (IR) in the digital environment can be seen to be closely related to data mining. The difference is that IR refers to the process of organising data and building algorithms so that queries can be written to retrieve the required information. Data mining, on the other hand, refers to the process of discovering hidden patterns, relationships and trends within the data. IR can be seen as problem-orientated whereas data mining is data-orientated. There are various subsets within the field of information retrieval in the digital environment. These include: blog retrieval, cross-lingual information retrieval, document retrieval, multimedia information retrieval, music retrieval, personal information retrieval, record retrieval, spoken content retrieval, text retrieval, visual information retrieval and web retrieval. There are a wide variety of digital tools and software packages available for IR. Some of these are open source and free to use, whereas others have significant costs attached.
