[Sigia-l] Faceted approach applied to content

[Marcia Morante]

Kathleen -

Your plan sounds fine, except I'm confused by the terminology that you're
using.  From your description, you appear to have metadata scheme or a group
of attributes as opposed to a faceted taxonomy.  Since you mention both
Ranganathan and taxonomies, I assume that's the context.  I'm not clear on
why you call it a taxonomy, since you're not allowing for any hierarchy.

Each of your metadata elements consists of a list of values - not unusual
for metadata.  A faceted taxonomy, on the other hand, describes various
aspects of a subject, but its attraction is that each facet can be
hierarchical.  Doesn't have to be, but it can be.  The beauty of it is that
when you're dealing with a subject that's fairly homogeoneous (such as wines
or recipes or mortgage banking), you can have users choose from different
aspects of the subject very easily and clearly.  Typically, you would have
only one value associated with each aspect, but there are no hard and fast
rules, as long as the underlying application supports what you do.  Finally,
there is no conflict between having list values (flat) and taxonomies values
(hierarchical) in the same metadata scheme.

Marcia

Marcia Morante
KCurve, Inc.
(718)881-5915 - office
(917)821-2087 - mobile
http://kcurve.com
Effective Content Management for the Web


> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On Behalf Of
> kkotwica at cxo.com
> Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 1:08 PM
> To: SIGIA-L at asis.org
> Subject: [Sigia-l] Faceted approach applied to content
>
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> A little background:
>
> I have convinced my company to go to a faceted like tagging
> system for a new
> system being built. I've created a facets and values document
> that will be used
> to tag/describe all of our products and customers (database and
> apps back-end
> still being built but soon will be in testing phase). Our products are not
> retail items like TVs or wine, but content driven like articles,
> white papers,
> survey results, and events. This system also needs to describe
> our customers,
> including readers, event attendees, sponsors, vendors, and
> discussion thread
> members.
>
> I have used hierarchical taxonomies in the past and the parent-child
> relationships always makes it hard to update/change the system. I
> believe the
> flat, flexible and multiplicative aspects of a faceted approach
> is the way to
> go.
>
> I have read what I can about faceted classification online,
> including summaries
> of Ranganathan's theory (have not read the original). One of the
> tenets as I
> understand it is facets must be mutually exclusive (unique
> qualities) from each
> other. That makes sense to me.
>
> The question:
>
> 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.
>   I don't
> think it's a problem but want to get your feedback.
>
> Kathleen Kotwica
> Director of Online Research
> CXO Media Inc.
> kkotwica at cxo.com
> http://www.cxo.com
>
>
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