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

[Avi Rappoport]

At 4:45 PM -0500 6/16/04, Jonathan Broad wrote:
>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

Fascinating, I love learning more about how it goes with other 
people.  If you'd ever like to write an article, I'd be interested in 
editing it and publishing it on SearchTools.com.

You might want to look at Convera, apparently they have pretty well 
started over and are serious about facets.  Tom Reamy of KAPS group 
likes it a lot.

Best of luck,

Avi
--
   Avi Rappoport, Search Engine Consultant <mailto:avirr at searchtools.com> 
   Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
             <http://www.searchtools.com>