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

[Jonathan Broad]

On Jun 16, 2004, at 4:13 PM, Avi Rappoport wrote:

> There are a number of alternatives to Endeca.  The two I know most 
> about are i411, which scales to the millions and is running a baby 
> bell yellow pages site,<http://www.dexonline.com>, and Siderean 
> Seamark, which uses RDF (links at 
> <http://searchtools.com/info/faceted-metadata.html>).

Thanks!  I've been exploring those options, actually, having already 
found them via your most helpful website.  I'm finding i411 extremely 
difficult to get in touch with (the contact form is broken, and I 
frankly resent the lack of an 800 number--very bad business sense.  No 
email address.)

Siderean is an interesting company.  I'd love to go an RDF route, but I 
have concerns about scalability and integration costs.  Endeca's 
advantage, so far as I've been able to determine, is to have surmounted 
a rather tricky computer science problem in terms of performance.  
Otherwise I'd be doing this myself, based on the Flamenco project's 
nice data model.

Performance and scalability are paramount concerns for me, as I'm 
dealing with a large collection (~500,000) with a complex vocabulary 
(hopefully reduced to ~20,000 terms when I'm through with it; currently 
much larger and...let's just say a bit messy.)

Jonathan