Matter

Indexable Matter in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Indexable Matter in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Indexable Matter may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Indexable matter is the actual portion of a documentary unit on which indexing or classification is based — on which index terms or headings are based or from which terms are extracted. Not all indexes need to be based on the entire text of a message. Sometimes a message can be adequately summarized by a part of its text. Thus, if an index does not need to be very detailed, a good title might be sufficient to represent the message of a periodical article for purposes of indexing or classification. In that case, the title could be the indexable matter for the documentary unit — the periodical article. Abstracts of scholarly articles are a common example of indexable matter. Many indexing and abstracting services base their indexing and classification only on the abstracts of the messages that they cover. For important messages, the entire text of the message may need to be consulted, thereby making the entire text the indexable matter. Sometimes, whole categories of messages may be excluded from indexable matter (and also from documentary domain). An index for a scholarly journal, for example, may index only substantive research articles and exclude from indexable matter all advertisements, letters to the editor (unless they comment on articles that are indexed), announcements, calls for papers, etc. (Indexable matter is also called analysis base, because it constitutes the base, or basis, of analysis — the text on which analysis is based.)