The effect of assigning a metadata or indexing term on document ordering

The assignment of indexing terms and metadata to documents, data, and other information representations is considered useful, but the utility of including a single term is seldom discussed. The author discusses a simple model of document ordering and then shows how assigning index and metadata labels improves or decreases retrieval performance. The Indexing and Metadata Advantage (IMA) factor measures how indexing or assigning a metadata term helps (or hurts) ordering performance. Performance values and the associated IMA expressions are computed, consistent with several different assumptions. The economic value associated with various term assignment decisions is developed. The IMA term advantage model itself is empirically validated with computer software that shows that the analytic results obtained agree completely with the actual performance gains and losses found when ordering all sets of 14 or fewer documents. When the formulas in the software are changed to differ from this model, the predictions of the actual performance are erroneous.