Information recovery (RI) is a computer area that deals with storing documents and automatically retrieving information associated with them. Through information retrieval, users have access to representations of the content of documents existing in databases or in any environment that stores that content.

It is a science that investigates the search for information in documents, the search for the same documents, the search for metadata that describe documents and the search in databases, which are relational and isolated or interconnected in a hypermedia network, like the World Wide Web. The media can be available in the form of text, sound, images or data.

However, there is a lot of confusion between the terms and concepts of “data recovery”, “document recovery”, “information recovery” and “text recovery”. Indeed, each one of them is a specialized area with its own body of knowledge.