Adventures in faceted classification: A brave new world or a world of confusion

1
Adventures in faceted classification A brave new
world or a world of confusion?

• Kathryn La Barre, Indiana University
  klabarre_at_indiana.edu
• 14 July, 2004
• Project homepage
• http//mypage.iu.edu/klabarre/facetstudy.html

2
Commentary

• Faceted classification is one of the most
  powerful, yet least understood, methods of
  organizing information.
• Peter Merholz Innovations in Classification.
  (September 2001) http//www.peterme.com/archives/0
  0000063.html

I personally find the term facet to be
confusing. I prefer the terms attributes and
attribute values. These terms are used in both
the database world and the artificial
intelligence world, to describe a very similar
functionality, sometimes the exact same
functionality. ReSIGIA-l Faceted approach
applied to content From Donna M.
FritzscheDate Fri Nov 14 2003 - 135423 EST
http//www.info-arch.org/lists/si
gia-l/0311/0161.html
My complaint is that there is a lot of talk about
facets, but little of any substance. Most of it
won't help you build your own faceted
classification scheme. It amounts to saying the
grass is greener on the other (faceted) side, but
fails to give you a map explaining how to get
there and what obstacles you'll face along the
way. And the academic literature doesn't help
much either. It's too dense and I can't recommend
it to the practitioner (not the stuff I've seen).
May 27, 2004 Gordon Luk http//www.getluky.net/a
rchives/000052.html
Faceted classification serves up multiplepure
classification schemes rather than a single
motley Taxonomy. Rosenfeld, L Morville, P.
(2002). Information Architecture for the World
Wide Web. 2nd Ed. Cambridge, MA OReilly.
3
Timeline

• September 2001 - Peter Merholz
• Innovation in classification
• January 2002 - Travis Wilson FacetMap
• March 2002 Phil Murray KMConnection
• April 2002 - Discussion on SIG/IA list
• May 2002 Peter Van Dijck XFML
• July 2002 Rosenfeld and Morville Information
  Architecture for the World Wide Web. 2nd Ed.
• December 2002 Van Dijck/ Murray establish
• Faceted Classification discussion list

4
Pilot study

• Facets on the web
• http//mypage.iu.edu/klabarre/facetstudy.html

5
Buildings
6
Facet analysis

• Fundamental concepts are analyzed and
  grouped together as facets
• Hunter, E. (2002) Classification made simple.
  Ashgate
• Building Facets
• Location
• Composition
• Purpose
• Date/Period constructed
• Performance
• Style
• Associated persons
• ETC. . .

7
Faceted search
421,291 images
8
(No Transcript)
9
1,050 images
10
163 images
11
15 images
12
421,291
13

• Founded 2002-Commercial development of the IDEA
  (Information for Design Engineering in Aerospace)
  project At the Universities of Bath and Bristol.
• Adaptive Concept Matching technology behind
  Adiuri's Waypoint product suite has finally
  enabled faceted classification information access
  applications to solve the problems of infoglut.
• Waypoint Classifier
• Waypoint Information Access Product

14
Sent vrijdag 9 januari 2004 013 To
facetedclassification_at_yahoogroups.com I'm
Pete Bell from Endeca, a software company based
in Cambridge, MA Since 1999, we've been
developing Search and Guided Navigation software
that makes it easier for people to find
information What is Guided Navigation?
Endeca's brand name for our flavor of faceted
search and navigation.
15
Faceted navigation
16
CompUSA
17
Research trajectory

• Website survey
• Information architect survey
• Primer construction
• Guidelines
• Use, impact, future of facet analytical theory
• for applications
• de novo traditional

18
References

• Project homepage (study continues)
  http//mypage.iu.edu/klabarre/facetstudy.html
• CompUSA http//www.compusa.com
• Endeca http//endeca.com
• Adiuri http//www.adiuri.com
• Images of England http//www.imagesofengland.org.
  uk
• Hunter, Eric. (2002). Classification made simple.
  Gower/Ashgate.
• Ranganathan, S. R. (1959). Elements of library
  classification. London Association of Assistant
  Librarians