Information retrieval (IR) is about matching human information needs to data objects. Rich structural markup of documents will enable a next generation of IR systems to better meet the information needs of people because the markup will help to disambiguate the language used for the documents (Newby, 2000). Metadata will further enhance the capabilities of IR systems by providing high quality descriptions of content.

Information space is defined as the set of concepts and relations among held by an information system. This is as compared to cognitive space, which is the set of concepts and relations among them held by a human (see Newby, 2001 for further detail). For IR, it has been argued that a long-term goal is for IR systems to act as extensions to human memory (also known as, exosomatic memory systems; introduced in Brookes, 1980). Were such systems to exist, finding information would be the same as remembering information already known. For this long-term goal to be realized, information spaces of IR systems would need to be tightly coupled to the cognitive spaces of their individual users.

Link:
http://informationr.net/ir/7-4/paper137.html
Another use of *information spaces*. Note, I have seen more use of the term, which makes me feel more comfortable about the focus of my site.