[sigia-l] Faceted browsing WAS The category of "Miscellaneous "

[Jonathan Broad]

On Jun 16, 2004, at 2:05 PM, Reese, Dean wrote:

> Parametric, does not need imply single attribute only, semantically 
> maybe. In the implementation from Verity it is not a limitation. Is it 
> a synonym, again I think it depends on implementation, it can be.

It could very well be that, in practice, Verity has similar 
capabilities to Endeca.  I didn't mean to imply that, just because 
Verity calls it's search parametric, and that parametric search is 
limited, that Verity's search is actually limited in that way.  That's 
why I keep mentioning the role of marketing in terminological 
discussions.

But I insist, and I hope appropriately for the audience here, that it's 
worthwhile thinking of parametric search as distinct from faceted 
search/navigation, as implemented in Endeca, Flamenco, Verity, and 
perhaps(?) elsewhere, and as modeled in Topic Maps (and OWL/RDF, etc.). 
  They're really quite different ways of building systems around 
information objects.

A parameter is an attribute of an object, with a value or not for each 
instance.

Unless "topics" (and their relations) have the same status in a system 
as objects (documents, images, whatever), then the search capabilities 
of that system are limited to *either* flat facets (a shallow list of 
terms) or single value attributes (proper names, for instance).

Faceted search/navigation (and, separately, the Topic Map model) 
represent topics, instances of topics, and intersections between 
topics, all independently.  This is what makes them different, 
regardless of what you call it.  By being first-class citizens in a 
system, the system is qualitatively improved, I would argue (assuming a 
useful topic structure, of course!)

Cheers,
Jonathan