[Sigia-l] Navigating through three dimensions

Tue Jul 16 18:01:49 EDT 2002

hi all:

this is the compendium of responses i recieved

thanks for the fab feedback
i did solve my problem

sorry for the delay

cheers
javier

-----Original Message-----
From: javier velasco [mailto:lists at mantruc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 10:07 AM
To: Sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Navigating through three dimensions

Navigation spaces is one of the IA subjects that most 'fires me up', I
always dreamed of designing an interesting navigation space. Now I have
my chance, and the scope of the project is rather shocking, I think I'm
heading in the right direction, but I'd like to ask for some advice from
this amazing group.

This is the case:

I have a huge archive of articles, mainly news articles. And my plan is
to organize a browsable archive to engourage navigation, wandering. My
approach is to organize the archive into tree axis:

- Subject - remember "my first taxonomy"? it covers sports, culture,
society, education, etc. very huge.
- Publication (Media) - 4 newspapers, 7 magazines, some other media and
their corresponding sections.
- Date - publication date.

I believe these three axis sytem qualifies as a faceted system. Am I
right?

So where I need your help is in taking it to the interface level, please
send me examples of interfaces that manage this kind of stuff, or ideas
on how I could keep on moving.

Of course all kind of comments, or advice regarding the pre-interface
plan are also welcome.
If there's interest I can surely share the replies.

Thanks in advance,
and also thanks for all the stuff you always feed to the list, it's an
invaluable resource.

Javier

-------

Javier --
Sounds like an exciting project. First of all, we would refer to your
taxonomy as multi-faceted, based on the three hierarchies you describe. So
the key in developing an interface is going to be selecting a visual
metaphor that allows users to navigate *across* hierarchies, as well as
into/out of them. Contextualizing information becomes a process of
determining what level of relationship should be displayed on-screen (i.e.,
do you show actual articles as related, or just display an article in it's
multi-faceted environment -- with categories as the related nodes --
causing the user to uncover related articles by clicking or mousing over a
representation of the category?).

There are ways to do this in HTML or DHTML, and it's being done more and
more in Flash. We've done it using Thinkmap, a Java-based platform we
developed. You can check out some of our sites for inspiration, if it helps.
Look at:

www.visualthesaurus.com

www.sonymusic.com/licensing

www.emplive.com/digitalcollection

http://millennium.sonymusic.com

I'd be glad to discuss more, if you want. I'm always excited to hear about
projects that actually value this type of navigation.

Best,
Peter
________________________________________________________________________

        p l u m b d e s i g n

        peter vlastelica | practice leader, electronic publishing
        157 chambers st ny ny 10007
        p.212-381-0550  f.212-285-8999
        www.plumbdesign.com
========================================

Javier,

There are many examples of commercial databases that can be searched by
access points like the ones you suggest. Your public library may subscribe
to them. One example in some public libraries is called "Ebsco Host."
University libraries have them as well. You might find databases from
ProQuest in a university library. They typically feature a "basic" and
"guided"(or "advanced") search interface. The "guided" interface usually
includes fields for "subject," "author," "date," and "source publication."

Depending on the variety of topics covered in the articles you are dealing
with, your biggest challenge may be in developing a browsing taxonomy. One
difficulty  will be dealing with "subnode" topics that fit into multiple
higher level categories. Another problem will be "taxonomy breakers," or
articles on peripheral topics that don't merit a separate category or
subcategory and have to be shoe horned in somewhere. You may find that
developing such a taxonomy is unwieldy. A better solution may be to create a

thesaurus of descriptors (subject terms), and make the thesaurus accessible
to searchers. This is how some database producers, including ProQuest,
handle this problem.

Bob Huerster, Senior Research Librarian, Thesaurus Editor, Indexer

----

This is a nice simple faceted system.  As for interface, I highly
recommend taking a look at Marti Hearst's work on faceted
browse/search, starting at <http://flamenco.berkeley.edu>.  There are
a couple of commercial search engines working on this as well,
including Endeca <http://www.endeca.com> and the one code-named
Teapot <http://www.bpallen.com>.

Your other problem will be keeping things working in the back end,
controlled vocabulary, subject taxonomy, stuff like that.

Avi

-----

you may already be aware of this site from previous postings, but Wine.com
has a good example of faceted search.

good luck,

-christina watkins

----

>I believe these three axis sytem qualifies as a faceted system. Am I
>right?

yep. It seems like a limited selection of facets though, have you thought
about adding more?

>So where I need your help is in taking it to the interface level,

Don't we all. Interfaces for faceted systems are a hard nut to crack. Good
luck with it!
Peter V

----

> I had visited Endeca's site sometime ago; it was surprisingly informative,

> well designed and organized .
>
> How does it perform in real life? Any concrete experiences?

I had a chat with them a few weeks ago. They showed me a lot of what they've

got going on, and it's *mighty* impressive.

Tower Records is their most obvious deployment

http://www.towerrecords.com/

If you click into "music," "classical," or "dvd", you can see they're all
run at endeca.com.

Tower has decided to base their entire navigation (on the left) with facets.

They've also got a promotions engine--none of the promotions in the middle,
or on the right, are hard-coded... They're all dynamically generated based
on rules.

Also, if you egregiously mistype, like I did in "music" with "Brittany
Speers" it corrects it automagically... And they claim it does so without
human intervention--it just keeps tweaking the query until it finds a match.

Anyway, it's a pretty damn smart system for a seemingly complete
search/browse/promote solution.

--peterme