The meaning of ‘about’ in fiction indexing and retrieval

In acknowledgement of the key position of the concept of ‘aboutness’ in the indexing process, the definition of the term ‘about’ seems to have become the crux of the discussion about indexing systems. ‘About’ is not a simple and self‐evident term in the process of indexing, and the earlier view of a one‐sided relationship between the term and the contents of documents is called into question. A new definition of ‘about’ is needed and a short review of recent contributions on the subject will illustrate some of the suggestions put forward for operational and functional definitions of the ‘aboutness’ of documents. The problem has also been tackled through experiments on alternative design criteria for indexing schemes (Swift et al).