Facets & Taxonomies

New Developments in Faceted Search:   

Most people have some understanding of the role of facets. Facets are derived structures that help us organize and access content in a much more precise and controlled way. Think PC Connection or just about any ecommerce site these days.  Shop by color, or price, product category, and so on. Each of these are facets of the content and controlled vocabularies typically populate these lists.  

However, we are also seeing a drive toward less control and a decentralization of term creation. Think tags and collaboration tools like wikis and blogs. Is there a hybrid process? Can we get the precision of facets with the adaptability of tags?    

This session will explore these issues. 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.  

 When Facets Meet Wikis and Tags  

 "Put simply, if you’re an information architect, we see facets in your future," write Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld in the newest edition of O'Reilly's "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web"  (aka The Polar Bear book.) Faceted classification has moved beyond early adopters in the past few years, and is now graduating to more advanced projects. One such use is enterprise social collaboration, aka Enterprise 2.0. In particular, facets are being used to improve information access for employee-generated content like wikis and blogs. And this content is categorized into facets with folksonomies, or user-generated tags. But without centralized authority, how can facets ensure security, tame chaos, and coexist with curated content?  In this session, we'll show results from Endeca's own internal deployment of such a system, which has served as a laboratory for innovations on facets in enterprise social collaboration.