[Sigia-l] Faceted approach applied to content

[Locatelli at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/14/2003 1:08:21 PM Eastern Standard Time, kkotwica at cxo.com writes:
> Do the values of a facet need to be mutually exclusive?  Because I'm working
> with content and concepts, more complex ("fuzzy") than a bottle of wine, I will
> allow an internal tagger to select multiple values from a facet to describe an
> entity. I'm not sure if that, classically, is considered a no-no. 

There are two questions here: (1) the nature of the facet values and (2) tagging content with multiple values.

With regard to the facet values themselves, optimally, the values should be mutually exclusive. That is, it should be (relatively) easy to determine whether or not to choose term A or term B. Of course, given the nature of language itself and the nature of the content, you may have some fuzziness. But it's best to keep that to a minimum so that content taggers can do better tagging and users can more easily find what they are looking for.

Tagging a document with multiple facet values is clearly acceptable if the item being tagged deals in a significant way with more than one topic. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it should be tagged with all relevant terms. And that's very different from the traditional way of classifying items for a library, for instance, where there is only one "best place" for an item. Here, you want users to be able to find whatever relevant information a document contains, whether it be focused on a single topic or on multiple topics.

What you don't want to have happen on the other hand is tagging with multiple terms that mean nearly the same thing just because the vocabulary is too fuzzy and you need to cover all your bases.

Fred Leise
Information Architect/Metadata Designer/Indexer
www.contextualanalysis.com
773-561-5211