Faceted Approach for Information Management

Designing the Samurai sword: using facets to support agile, highly-effective information management By Jennifer Smith, FUMSI (June 1, 2011)

Jennifer Smith writes persuasively on the ease of using a faceted design for retrieving information. She works for ONEIS, a UK company that desogms and supports information management systems.

She makes the faceted approach sound easy - "When deploying a faceted system, you need to map out what information you have, who needs to access it and how they would want to find it. You then create the structure for representing that information using Types and Attributes."

Finding Facets in a Folksonomy

to_be_classified A Facet Analysis of a Folksonomy , Elise Conradi, Journal of Information Architecture (Fall 2010)

The loose tagging that people do in personal indexing of articles can be mined to reveal facets as we see through this article - "This paper illustrates how a facet analysis of a broad folksonomy based on the postulational approach can reveal underlying conceptual categories and facets to which the folksonomy's aggregated tags belong. In this way, facet analysis techniques are used to manually expose a faceted classification ontology in the flat tag space, thus revealing user-generated relationships between information items. "

Postulational approach (in case you are wondering) "to facet analysis refers to a methodology used for both the creation (by a classificationist) and subsequent usage (by classifiers) of a faceted classification scheme."

The study used data from Library Thing, a social networking site for people to catalog their book collections. From an analysis of tags to 76 history books emerged two universes: book and subject, and out of these a discernment of facets that was aided by using the Ranganathan framework of Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time.

Of interest, especially to librarians, is this conclusion - "As will be discussed, the inclusion of users in a faceted classification may provide novel ways to personalize faceted navigation. "

Determining Classes

Skills of a Classy Taxonomist, The Taxonomy Blog, (Aug 10)

It appears than taxonomy and ontology are not quite the same but they do have a common base. At a SemTech conference the consensus seems to have been that, "Taxonomists build hierarchies, and ontologists determine classes or categories."

Author goes on to describe the use of class (or facet) analysis.

"Defining classes or ontology work typically precedes building the taxonomy. Defining the classes is like writing a specification for the taxonomy; in fact defining classes is the same as defining facets. The goal of a taxonomist and ontologies should be to define a specific, unambiguous description of a term that helps manage how we find and organize content so the pathways are clear and specific; adding an ontology ensures that the term is placed in the most specific categories to help ensure clarity and lack of ambiguity."

Modelling strategies are needed to do this well. Posting mentions some tools and approaches.

Facets for Taxonomies

From Sumo to Samurai: getting your taxonomies fighting fit: Part 1 by Kate Simpson, FUMSI (June 2010)

This FUMSI article follows up on a 2-part piece last year on Designing User-Centred Taxonomies. Kate Simpson takes issue with what she calls Sumo taxonomies (blockbuster big), and proposes more use of facets and faceted search.

"Part 1 of this article - yes, if it's about taxonomies it just seems to need two parts - introduces the concept of facets and the power of faceted navigation and search. A later article will aim to train any of those lumbering Sumo-type taxonomy trees you may have into the fighting-fit warriors of Samurai facets."

Classification systems as we have known them were designed for paper. Facets work better for digital.

Basics of Faceted Search

The Future of Search? Faceted Search by Daniel Tunkelang, Chief Scientist at Endeca, Altsearchengines (Oct )

Endeca is known for the faceted search it offers. In this article, its chief scientist, Daniel Tunkeland, provides a brief description, some images, and some history.

Mainly -- "As a practical matter, the facets for a collection are typically derived either from pre-existing fields in a database (e.g., the columns in a relational database or data warehouse) or by applying information extraction techniques to unstructured content, (e.g., detecting names of people and places in free text)."

Faceted approach is most often seen at retail web sites since it is an excellent way to allow browse and search of products by brand, prices, and various attributes.

Faceted Analysis of online media types

Anticipating new media: A faceted classification of material types Green, Rebecca and Fallgren, Nancy (2007) Anticipating new media: A faceted classification of material types. In Tennis, Joseph T., Eds. Proceedings North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization 2007 1, pages pp. 87-99, Toronto, Ontario.

Interesting application of faceted analysis.

Abstract

"The emergence of new media types, many seemingly without counterparts in the non-digital world, challenges the readiness of existing knowledge organization schemes to accommodate them. A knowledge organization scheme based on a faceted analysis of existing classes of bibliographic materials is likely to accommodate new developments better than one based on a list of unanalyzed material types. The faceted analysis undertaken here, in which seven facets are recognized (content, generation of content, recording of content, publication/distribution, physical characteristics, perception/use, and relationships) shows the inadequacy of the traditional view of the bibliographic community of a fundamental distinction between content and carrier; interaction between content and carrier is common and enters into the characterization of material types. The facet analysis is validated by applying it to two new material types, wikis and blogs.

Facets and Taxonomies

The Taxonomy Community of Practice (Earley and Associates) is running a session on Facets and Taxonomies Search online on August 29, 1pm to 2pm EDT. Price $50 US.

From the announcement: "We'll start with an overview of facets and faceted search and then hear from Peter Bell, one of the founders of Endeca, a faceted search company, about new developments in the field that allow a combination of unstructured and structured tagging and classification. "

Endeca Finds Relationships

Endeca Tackles Complex Interrelationships in New IAP Version by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 30, 2007)

Endeca Technologies (www.endeca.com) is best known for Guided Navigation, a faceted view for discovering content at a website. This article describes improvements that make possible "new data-driven approach with metarelational indexing that lets users navigate complex relationships between different types of information from different sources".

From the article - "Here’s a simplified description of how Endeca’s architecture works. Each document or record is a set of facets. Some facets are explicit, such as database fields or file metadata. In addition, the text itself can be transformed into explicit facets through entity and term extraction, classification, and other techniques. Finally, what the document is “about” from the user’s perspective is implicit, so Endeca keeps a full-text index of the document as another facet. Working with facets allows Endeca to adapt to disparate information types, to make connections and correlations, and to show the content interrelationships to users."

Article includes screenshots and links to a demo.