[Sigia-l] Faceted Classification

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

Robert M. Fein wrote:
> Can someone give a definition?

It has always seemed to me that "faceted classification" is just a fancy
way of saying "put your content into a database and use lots of metadata
fields".

PeterM gave the example of TowerRecords.com as a faceted classification
system. I don't see how TowerRecords is much more faceted than many many
other sites that also contain lots of data objects (online stores, news
sites, etc). For example, Amazon.com is also faceted. In fact, I can't
think of too many large online searchable datasets that are not faceted.


"Faceted classification" is a new concept for folks whose idea of a web
site is a bunch of HTML files sitting in directories with a search
engine that crawls through those directories to find pages with keyword
matches.

If, however, you've worked with sites that use databases or content
management systems (as many of us have been doing for years), then
you've pretty much been immersed in the concept of faceted
classification and it will be nothing new to you. If you've ever built a
search tool where you can search data by author, date, etc, then you've
worked with faceted classification.

The reason why faceted classification is so resonant right now is that
people are realizing that data objects (CDs, movies, news stories,
dollhouse furniture, whatever) can have a lot more metadata than most
systems currently use - for example, a news story commonly has several
metadata fields: headline, date, author, summary, body, source, section
(international, sports, arts, etc). But one could also add fields like
topic (nuclear proliferation, accounting, celebrities) geopolitical
regions mentioned in the article, geopolitical region of the publisher,
political leaning of the publisher (right, left), type of article
(analysis, opinion, news), and dozens more. With such added information,
searching, sorting, and cross-linking becomes much more powerful.

To me, the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) is the
quintessential example of the power of faceted classification.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com






> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] 
> On Behalf Of Robert M. Fein
> Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 5:13 AM
> To: sigia-l at asis.org
> Subject: [Sigia-l] Faceted Classification
> 
> 
> Can someone give a definition?
> 
> thanks in advance
> 
> _____________________________________________
> --rmf
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> have nothing
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