Tool to build faceted navigation

VisualDataWeb Announces the Release of tFacet, SemanticWeb.com (May 15)

People developing a faceted view of data may find tFacet from VisualDataWeb helpful.

"... a new tool that applies known interaction concepts to allow hierarchical-faceted exploration of RDF data.” According to the description, “The aim is to facilitate ordinary users to formulate semantically unambiguous queries so as to support the fast and precise access to information. Used interaction concepts are e.g. a directory tree and interchangeable columns that are already well-known from other applications. The directory tree, for example, is used to enable the intuitive exploration and selection of hierarchical facets. "

Website has a short screencast and a demo.

Promoting Faceted Navigation

Faceted Navigation: Grouping – An UnTapped Potential?, James Kalback, Experiencing Information (Dec 6)

Apparently the many people still need to be persuaded of the value of faceted organization of results. Kalback describes the merits of facets for improving relevance for the user and refers to Marti Hearst work in the 1990s at Xeroc PARC

The advantage is in the groupings - "The theory is, structuring a results list by clustering items around a topic better reveals “aboutness” of subsets of items, and this in turn potentially increases the chance of relevance. This isn’t only true in academic settings: studies show that grouping results can be of significant benefit in broader contexts on the web. ]"

Gives the World Digital Library as an example of a site that is applying a faceted construction.

Peter Morville on Search

Peter Morville, co-author of Search Patterns, answers questions in this interview - Customer Behaviour and Business Insights at Bridgeline Digital.

+ Value of faceted search - more of a discovery process
+ Difference between faceted navigation and parametric search
+ Inherent problems in semantic search - we need context to understand meaning

"In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or "ontologies") that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don't scale, and they can't keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge."

+ Using search analytics to improve navigation - " Also, for sites like Etsy.com that combine taxonomy with folksonomy, there's a wonderful opportunity to create a feedback loop. Popular tags should be considered for integration into the taxonomy, to help users navigating within the site and to improve SEO."

Search Patterns' excerpt on faceted navigation is online

Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender wrote in their book, Search Patterns, that
"Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade."

We see it mainly in e-commerce, but it can help in many other situations.

Chapter 4 of the book is available at AListApart - Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

"Faceted navigation addresses the universal need to narrow. Consequently, this pattern has become nearly ubiquitous in e-commerce, given the availability of structured metadata and the clear business value of improving product findability. Faceted navigation is being deployed rapidly across an impressively wide variety of contexts and platforms. In the world of search, faceted navigation is everywhere. "

Designing for Faceted Search

Special Report – Designing for Faceted Search By Stephanie Lemieux (with Seth Earley & Associates) Altsearchengines (Dec 2009)

This article, originally published in KMWorld March 2009, is reproduced with diagrams and illustrations in AltSearchEngines. Article has good, practical advice for designing for faceted search.

Nstein Semantic Search

Nstein Technologies Launches Semantic Site Search, press release, NStein (Nov 17)

"Nstein Technologies Inc. www.nstein.com (TSX-V: EIN), a leader in digital content management solutions for information-rich enterprises, today announced the release of a new product, Semantic Site Search (3S). “3S is a front-end, multi-index search engine designed to provide users an unparalleled search experience,” said Nstein CTO Jean-Michel Texier. 3S leverages Nstein’s patented text-mining technology to power a faceted site search which returns highly accurate results that are organized categorically."

Endeca's New Platform

Endeca Aims to Scale New Enterprise Heights by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 2)

Endeca Technologies, Inc. has announced a new release of the Endeca Information Access Platform called the McKinley Platform, with "improvements in speed, scalability, and simplicity".

Endeca is noted for the Guided Navigation experience - a faceted view that organizes structured and unstructured enterprise data.

Financial Times recently debuted the Newssift service based on this.

"John Greenleaf, chief marketing officer, Financial Times Search, Newssift.com, says, "We partnered with Endeca to launch Newssift.com, a revolutionary site that monitors business news and the ever-changing landscape of ideas and opinions, facts, and supposition. Endeca's new platform is the foundation for our robust news site that provides customers with the ability to quickly sift through large amounts of content to make informed business decisions."

Designing for faceted search

Designing for faceted search By Stephanie Lemieux, KMWorld, (Mar 1, 2009)

Faceted search or guided navigation has become remarkedly popular at e-commerce sites and is seen often as a feature of auto-classification at some metasearch engines (eg ISeek.com).

This article describes faceted search and related trends, and shares five do's and don'ts on designing for faceted search.

"The power of faceted search lies in the ability of users to create their own custom navigation by combining various perspectives rather than forcing them through a specific path. Think of a cookbook: Authors have to organize the recipes in one way only—by course or by main ingredient, etc.—and users have to work with whatever choice of organizing principle that has been made, regardless of how it fits their particular style of searching. An online recipe site using faceted search can allow users to decide how they’d like to navigate to a specific recipe, offering multiple entry points and successive refinements. Figure 1 on page 15 (KMWorld, Vol 18 #3) shows how facets can help pinpoint content very precisely through the combination of perspectives. Just three facets with five terms each can represent 243 possible combinations."

Note: diagrams not available online.

The Problems of Relevance

Google Tech Talk: Reconsidering Relevance by Daniel Tunkelang, The Noisy Channel (Jan 8, 2009)

Daniel Tunkelang, Chief Scientist at Endeca, has posted slides of a presentation on Reconsidering Relevance at SlideShare of a talk he gave on the weaknesses of relevance-centric search and what might be used as alternatives.

"We’ve become complacent about relevance". This would be developers and users. As users, we are easily satisfied by the results we get from web search engines and don't appreciate that much can be done to assist and promote exploratory search. He reminds us that "information needs evolve as we learn". Faceted search and tagging, in particular, can assist searchers refine and clarify.

Look for the notes on the slides.

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.