[Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

[Tanya Rabourn]

Hanna, Holly wrote:
> True.  For example, in everyone's favorite example of a faceted thesaurus,
> evineyards.com (formerly wine.com), you've got Ravenswood Zinfandel under
> type/red wines/zinfandel, as well as under region/Californian/Sonoma Valley
> and under winery/R/.  To my mind, this doesn't confuse the user, since
> they're going to find what they're looking for regardless of how they go
> about doing it (and they'll do it without having to deal with
> cross-references).  It's the beauty of a faceted taxonomy.

But the way I understand faceted taxonomy, you still have mutually
exclusive categories within a single facet. The temptation seems to be to
place an item under more than one category within a single facet.

It would be like putting a single wine under more than one region. For
example, suppose there is a particular wine that's actually from New
Zealand, you have some reason to think that someone might mistakenly think
it's from Australia so you elect to put it under both.

-Tanya
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Tanya Rabourn <rabourn at columbia.edu>
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