Models of bibliographical Indexing concern the construction of effective keyword
taxonomies and the representation of relevance between document s and
keywords. The theory of evidence concerns the elicitation and manipulation of
degrees of belief rendered by multiple sources of evidence to a common set of
propositions. The paper presents a formal framework in which adaptive taxonomies
and probabilistic indexing are induced dynamically by the relevance
opinions of the library's patrons. Different measures of relevance and mechanisms
for combining them are presented and shown to be isomorphic to the
belief functions and combination rules of the theory of evidence. The paper
thus has two objectives: (i) to treat formally slippery concepts like probabilistic
indexing and average relevance, and (ii) to provide an intuitive justification
to the Dempster Shafer theory of evidence, using bibliographical indexing as a
canonical example.Information Systems Working Papers Serie