Abstract
We report on a project which attempts to classify representations of the anomalous states of knowledge (ASKs) of users of document retrieval systems on the basis of structural characteristics of the representations, and which specifies different retrieval strategies and ranking mechanisms for each ASK class. The classification and retrieval strategy specification is based on 53 real problem statements, 35 of which have a total of 250 evaluated documents. Four facets of the ASK structures have been tentatively identified, whose combinations determine the method and order of application of five basic ranking strategies. This work is still in progress, so results presented here are incomplete.